After a few weeks of work, I've finally got the Rock music catalog, well, cataloged.
10,000+ files, 54 GB, just in the Rock genre (next to do, thousands of Jazz, Soundtrack and Classical discs. Don't ask me about Comedy and World music...)
A few thoughts
- Maximum respect to the AllMusic.com guide, without it, I'd never have been able to get the genre, sub-genre, and dates of release right.
- Most of my discs were ripped using CDex, a great, free tool. Next up is to learn more about variable rate recording, so I can get that 54 GB disc space down a bit...
- I would never have attempted all the edits file-by-file! I am a registered user of Tag & Rename, very cool tool that let me edit thousands of tags quickly & safely. Next up is exporting tons of data to Excel, so I will know what albums I have (and need to buy) next time I'm shopping in the seconds bins (or legally downloading).
- When playing my music over the home network, I believe that jazz and progressive rock benefit from loading the entire album as a single (40-70MB) MP3 file. Lets you sift through dozens of albums instead of hundreds of tracks. Now, I know "the album format is dead" but humor me, I remember when 60 minutes of thematic, structured, produced music was well within the attention span of... oh heck, most folks stopped reading at bullet #2! The tool I use to join my tracks into single "albums" (or mix programs) is MP3 Splitter & Joiner - I've been a licensed user for more than a year now, and have 75+ albums on SD cards for use in my...
- SanDisk Sansa Sansa e140, micro-light, takes my collection of 20+ SD cards (256M to 2GB), $68 to carry 3+GB of music (take THAT nano!) all of which supplements my...
- Creative Labs Nomad Zen Xtra, 60GB hard drive based player. Heavy and quirky, but this thing held up great on my round-the-world trip last year!
I'm still using Winamp to play the music on my PC, and the Tivo Server to play over the Tivo units scattered around the house.
So much for the tech side of my music collecting, thoughts on the music itself coming soon...
