My OCD with music

Or more accurately my music library. I suppose this wouldn't come as much of a surprise for anyone who's seen my folder trees, but here goes.

It doesn't matter how obscure the song or where it's from, I must have the correct title, artist and genre.

For AC/DC, I tried to find a unicode character for lightning bolt for a while before giving up. The title has to be exactly as it is written, including all brackets (of the correct type), hyphens, semi-colons, tildes and stars (wtf). At one time I used to add the original artist on covers, but then I decided against it because sometimes a cover is more famous than the original (e.g. All Along the Watchtower: Hendrix vs Dylan) or in jazz where everything is pretty much a standard.

The genre must be labeled as category-subcategory. I don't label something as hard rock, I label it as Rock-Hard. That way I won't end up with bebop next to black metal when sorting by genre. I have special conditions for using the soundtrack and musical tags, I will tag something as soundtrack only if the source album is a soundtrack, and if I have no other entries by the same artist that are labeled otherwise. The logic being that if I downloaded a soundtrack in its entirety, I would probably want all the songs from the source to appear next to each other when sorting, but this is superseded by the fact that I want songs by the same artist to also appear next to each other as much as possible. Similar conditions for musical, with the additional disjunctive that any song that originated from a musical is automatically tagged as musical. That means "Seasons of Love" = musical, "I Wanna Love Him So Bad" != musical.

Secondary is the album, which I try find as much as possible, it's not hard most of the time.

Tertiary tags are the year and track number, which I won't bother looking up if the other tags are already correct. Honestly, when am I ever going to sort my library by year and track number anyways? Besides, I haven't got a system for labeling tracks on albums with A and B sides or albums that have multiple disks yet.

If you think that's obsessive, I calculate the ratio between all the categories frequently. For instance, J-pop must never exceed 5% of my library by track titles and I am trying to push metal under 40%.

I have lots of problems with jazz because most songs are standards and there's is a whole lot of mislabeling. Also because a lot of performers played with each other, not to mention that someone like Miles Davis had a famous quartet, quintet, sextet and god-knows-whatever-tet. I end up just putting [et al] at the end of the artist because damned if I'm going to keep three entries for a single artist. I still have this big 40min long track with filename "John Coltrane-Live at Birdland", that I have no idea where it's from. For all I know it could've been someone sitting in the audience at Birdland with a tape recorder, in which case, it would be live at Birdland indeed.

FYI Rob, Coltrane plays tenor mostly and doesn't play cool jazz, tag that shit properly.

That doesn't even come close to the trouble I have with classical music though. If it's a baroque concerto, what would I label it as? Should I put the composer or the performer down as the artist? Sometimes I have the latter but not the former and vice versa. What if it's an arrangement, what then? Finally I have the worst time tracking down albums for that stuff. It's all become such a pain that I just refuse to download any.