It was five days ago when I finished the Chinese Music Phase of my Music Addition Project of 2017 after six focused days of hard work. As previously planned during the last several months, I finally went to a small, local CD shop in early April here in Chongqing, and got
four various-artist CD albums: two recent pop-song albums, and two disco.
(Each album has three CDs apiece, and anywhere from 36 to 54 songs total for that album. This was my first time since the summer of 2013 to get much Chinese music.)
I took them home, ripped them to my PC, converted 'em to MP3 at 192 kbps, and then entered the pinyin (Western-alphabetical spellings) for the Chinese characters into the MP3 filenames -- for the artist names and song titles. I usually just entered the particular Chinese characters I already recognized into
Baidu Search, and the full artist name and song title would come up in search results. Then, I copied and pasted those characters into Google Translate or Baidu Translate, and got the pinyin spellings to enter into the MP3s.
On rare occasions, I had to look up a character using a
radical chart, which can be a real pain. But luckily for me, this was the exception, and not the rule.
I also figured out good English names for the Chinese album titles, and named them accordingly.
Some of you may be asking, "Joe, why did you go out and buy CD albums, instead of just downloading songs from Chinese websites?"
Well, the main reason is for
sound quality. Songs on Chinese websites often have lackluster...or
downright terrible...sound quality. With locally-bought CDs, on the other hand, I usually get better sound.
Another reason for purchasing various-artist CDs is that I can get a good compilation of songs, and won't have to go searching willy-nilly all over the Chinese web, looking for good content with good sound quality. Each of these albums is around 7 U.S. dollars, averaging 45 songs per album, so it's pretty cheap, anyway.
In total, 165 songs were added in this phase. On one specific album, I didn't like about 1/3rd of the songs, so that particular album became "selected songs only."
There were two songs on the disco albums where I made my own extended versions, using an old program on my PC, called Cool Edit. In these homemade extended versions, I repeat the good parts of the song (and omit boring parts) in a way that sounds good and flows well. I then give the song a version name, such as JG's..........Mix. (JG is my initials. If the song is a Chinese-language one, then I often name my version JG's...........Yanshen. "Yanshen" (延伸)means
extension.)
I've done more than 100 of these kinds of extended versions for songs since the year 2000.
Well, at this point, I've now added 744 songs to my music collection since the start of this year! My collection currently stands at
10,568 songs and
744 albums. And with this latest addition, the size just surpassed
60 GB.
As I get more familiar with these new Chinese pop songs, I'll be able to go to local KTV Karaoke clubs here with my friends and sing some of these new songs, and it'll be lots of fun.
So...within the next month, I'll finally begin the "Open-Ended Phase" of this project. It'll mostly be material from individual music artists (especially from the Western world), which I'll check out and add what I like when I have time. I'll add stuff as I go, and there won't be any big completion dates, as there were with the first three phases.
Anyway, beneath this post you'll find a screenshot of the completed Chinese Music Phase, photos of the front and back covers of the CD albums, the back cover of one particular album, and then its corresponding screenshot with all the pinyin artist names and song titles for the MP3s. Click on each item for a larger view, and enjoy.