Music Server

[Dykey]

Good Heavens! it's neat & tidy.

(The only thing is, is when you have clean up like this and you want some item you knew was "in there" you cannot remember where you put it  OR an item that has been "in there" for years and you thought you had no use for and threw it out, all of a sudden you want it.)

[Ray]

Don't panic,... It won't last long.

About 12 months ago I had a huge ex Telstra office desk in here and it was going to be in the way when I painted the room, sooooo,... with a huge amount of effort the next door neighbour and I got it out the front door and onto the trailer where we took it to the Lion's Club Sale.

I got $5 for it. Now I need it again and I cant find anything like it anywhere.

[Ray]

Late yesterday I finally finished 99% of my reorganisation, the main part of which involved  converting WMAs, and getting rid of duplicates. This has reduced my number of files from 6,748 to 6,281, I still have several lurking in my library that as yet are undetected because they were named differently e.g.  some have had the word "The" in front of their names whereas other versions of the same track do not. There are also a very small number of unnamed tracks that I like, but with names like, "Track 09"  

I'll have to get some more knowledgeable persons than myself to help me out here  .  I know what I like, but often have no idea of what the track is called.

I am backing up this reorganised material as I type this, and will then after one last check, delete all of the music on my computers and reload the new files.

My backing up paranoia is kicking in bigtime right now.

Remember that nice clean desk I once had Utegirl? Haha, you've been foiled again.



And, Yeah,... I nicked TLWs screen so that I could see a few more files at a time when doing my editing. The loose hard drive sitting on the desk is normally only used in my removable drive for backups, so it has merely been jury rigged here to serve the purpose.

[utegirl70]

Remember that nice clean desk I once had Utegirl? Haha, you've been foiled again.

Still looks fairly clean Ray... if a little 'cluttered'. But then, who am I to judge?! Right now, I am typing on the OH's laptop, sitting in front of my useless imac 20" and display that is sitting in front of that..and cords everywhere!

That's why I haven't been around... having some issues with my puta. Hoping my nephew can sus it out tonight, in return for dinner. 

[Ray]

I'm sorry to hear that, I'm like a bear with a sore head if my puta is down for any reason. Fortunately I do have several alternate systems that I can play on if the need arises.

Failing that I'll unplug my mouse and keyboard and sit in front of the TV

[Ray]

I have at last finished recording and sorting our CD collection, all 8,357 tracks

Boy!,... what a job, the worst part being the making up of all of our Play lists again, as the Folder structure on my music server is different to my Desktop so the old play lists could not be transferred.

Making up the lists was further complicated by the fact that I now have ALL of our CD music on my hard disk rather than just the tracks that I particularly like. This leads to having multiple copies of many tracks by different artists and off different Albums, it really surprised me how much difference there was between some different versions, even when recorded by the same artist, obviously they were recorded at different venues or in different sessions with different backing and recording engineers.

Now it is time to start the really long and tedious part of the job as I start on the LPs.  This job is much more involved, as it entails actually having to play each track and label them with the track names, artist and Album name, also because LPs are prone to having scratches and clicks etc., many of them will have to have a considerable amount of editing and noise reduction.  Fortunately for me TLW has volunteered to do all the typing as she is an accomplished typist and will get it done much faster than I could ever hope to.

Several years ago TLW  bought me a proper turntable to do this job as we have been talking about it for years, and so far it is working really well, but I am disappointed in how many pops and clicks there are on our records, I always thought that we had taken very good care of them.

[Ray]

I'm just about sick of this music transcription business, over the last two days I have played and recorded another 200 tracks off our Popular Music of the 50s set. It's time consuming and quite wearing after a while as you only have the time while the track is playing to enter all of the details into your data sheet, including Track Name Artist Album etc. It is relatively easy to achieve, but you cant afford to let your mind wander as you will miss the end of one track and the beginning of the next and end up with several tracks in one large file.

I have averaged 5 hours on both days so far as I wanted to make it look like I had actually started to make a dent in our collection, sadly, the remaining heap of records looks no smaller as yet, But I'm not going to keep up this pace for long. I'm already starting to go stir crazy, I've just got to get outside for a few hours each day. I'll cut back to doing two LPs a day I think,... maybe a few more if it gets really cold or wet and I'm stuck inside anyway.


This is a scrunched up pichergraph of Media Monkey, I have found it to be excellent for sorting and maintaining my Music Folder.

[Ray]

Just a bit of an update.

This project is still bubbling along quietly and taking up quite a bit if my spare time with over 20,000 titles now (70Gb). The hardest part of the job is constantly sorting through the file list deleting duplicates  and correcting errors in the names etc.  For example the name "Walking with my baby" and "Walkin' with my baby" will not show as duplicates, so it  takes a lot of time sorting music by Artist and correcting misspellings and other errors. Every time I have a correction session, I re-synchronise my backup disk so that in the event of a critical failure in my Hard Drive, I won't lose all of my hard work.

One problem that is now starting to show up, is the time taken for my player software to read all the data, so this morning I went through and converted all of the WMA and FLAC files to MP3 and resampled all of the Bitrates 320kbs and above, back to 192 kbs.   I know it's nice to have music recorded at as high a bitrate as possible as this controls the fidelity, but after much reading and hunting around various audiophile sites it seems that it is a waste of time having bitrates over 192kbs as the average human ear can't tell the difference. Never the less, I still have my original files as well, so I can revert if the need ever arises. I gained a little over 3Gb of disk space by doing this.