My love of super heroes goes beyond comics, television, and movies. I also like audio dramas based on super heroes.

(Actually, I like audio dramas in general, but the super hero genre is definitely my favorite, to the surprise of absolutely no one.)

To be clear, this post is not about my love of audio dramas. I’ll get to that at some point. This post is about me being very particular about how things are organized, which has resulted in me spending hours organizing digital files, so they play properly.

Back in 2009 I downloaded every episode of the Superman radio show that was available at Archive.org. Sadly, there are large chunks of episodes that have been lost to the ages (particularly those that aired during World War II), but there were hundreds of episodes to grab and listen to. I was really excited to load them on to my Zune.

(For those that don’t know what a Zune is, it was a digital music player from the mid-2000s that served as Microsoft’s answer to the iPod. For those that do remember what the Zune was and are now itching to leave a comment mocking me for having one, keep two things in mind. One, my wife gave it to me for Christmas, and it was a huge gift. Two, that thing was damn near indestructible and lasted six years of me dropping it on the regular. The only reason I stopped using it is the headphone jacked got messed up, and I was most upset that I couldn’t use it anymore. My wife had one as well and it worked all the way up to 2019. So back off of all the Zune bashing, Shag.)

Anyway…

I loaded up one of the folders full of episodes on to my Zune, went to listen to it, and was dismayed to see that the episodes were, to use a technical term, all jacked up. The tracks were all out of order, which made listening to them problematic.

And this is when I learned about what metadata was as far as digital music files are concerned.

Metadata, according to Oxford, is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. It’s data about data. It means different things to different digital files, and when it comes to music files it means things like album name, song title, track number, year of production, etc. While the files were all named in a (somewhat) organized manner, the metadata was all out of whack. The album names weren’t consistent, and the track numbers were pretty much non-existent. Don’t get me started on track names.

Now, some people would just throw up their hands and deal with it as simply as possible. I could have easily just made a playlist, put the tracks in order, and gone from there.

But that wasn’t going to work for me.

To be fair, I didn’t deal with it right away. In fact, I was so annoyed I left those files alone for years. Then my wife and I got our first iPhones, which led me to download iTunes to my computer, which led me to import all of my music files I wanted to put on my phone. It was at this point that I started going into the 14 or so different albums and sorting out the metadata.

Track.

By.

Track.

I didn’t do it all in one day. I love repetitive tasks while watching re-runs of Law and Order as much as the next person, but once I finished one of the folders, I’d be kind of done. Because it wasn’t just renaming a few files. Each folder contained roughly 75 to 80 files. And I didn’t just change the name of the track. No, I had to change the album title of the entire folder, the artist and composer bits, and make sure that the track was numbered correctly so that it would play in the proper order.

After a good bit of time, all fourteen folders were done.

But I wasn’t.

See, because the newly organized “albums” weren’t proper albums put out by a proper company, they didn’t have any album art to go with them. And I am just anal-retentive enough to hate the default icon that pops up on an iPhone when the track doesn’t have an album cover.

So, I made my own.

I went through a few iterations. My skills with Photoshop can best be described as adequate so they were rather crude at first, but I finally settled on a style that I liked.

Which meant I was done.

But I wasn’t.

See, the Superman radio show isn’t one show that ran from 1940 to 1951. It’s easy to talk about it  in those terms because we are so far from when it aired, but it was actually five different shows under the Superman umbrella. From 1940-1942 it was a syndicated show that was transcribed (recorded ahead of time) and then sent to stations around the United States to play. From 1942 to 1949 the show was called The Adventures of Superman and aired on the Mutual Broadcasting System. Then, from 1949 to 1951, things got weird. From February to June of 1949 the show went from 12 minutes to a half-hour. Then, in October of 1949 the show jumped to ABC (the American Broadcasting Company), where it was aired on Saturday nights. Finally, the show ended as a weekday afternoon broadcast on ABC from June 1950 to March 1951.

(For more information on both the Superman radio series and the George Reeves television series, pick up a copy of Flights of Fantasy by Michael J. Hayde. It is a wonderful resource for both shows.)

When I learned that the show went through several permutations I went back and reorganized the shows, renaming the albums to reflect where it fell during the show’s run. I also made new art for the newly renamed albums.

And then…for the moment…I was done.

It might seem kind of silly to go to all of the trouble that I did, but, at the end of the day, I enjoyed the journey. From a bunch of barely organized folders downloaded from the Internet to an overly organized group of folders on my hard drive and phone. I even gave the files their own genre, which I’ve done with a lot of the music and audio I have acquired over the years. Having the various Superman soundtracks and scores under Soundtrack is kind of boring. Having it under the Superman section…that’s the ticket. Batman, Hulk, Spider-Man and Flash also have their own genre sections.

Again, kind of silly.

Again, it makes me happy.

More to follow…