Paul's Posts — 06 October 2012
By Paul McGowan
We’ve been focusing on storage hardware for your music library and now it’s time to start thinking about the actual library itself. This is an important step if you’re starting from scratch – perhaps even more important to make sure you’re happy with your organization if you’re already in the thick of it.
To review our progress so far, you’ve made the decision of how you’re going to store your library. The choices are a NAS or a desktop computer with either attached or internal storage or both. My vote has always been the latter, focusing on using the cheap and cheerful USB 3.0 hard drives that you can find on “any street corner” of the web.
With your decision in mind the next issues we need to think about are ripping and then organizing – because without ripping from CD’s to hard drive you have nothing to organize. But wait! When you rip your media you are committing to an organizational scheme because ripping is where we get our metadata that is the basis of identifying the tracks and albums in our library.
So I’d like to get started somewhat out of sequence if I may. Let’s first decide how we plan on organizing our library and then second, we’ll take a look at the various options for ripping our music.
I want to leave today by assigning you some homework. Yeah I know, when you signed up for these daily posts you thought I was going to do all the work – but no! Now I am asking something from you. OK, well, you don’t actually have to, but I recommend that if this is a subject you’re interested in that you do a bit of reading first.
I would start here: http://brianabbott.net/projects/how-i-organize-classical-music-in-itunes
and then download this:
http://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-ebook.html
Between these two documents we can start to see some of the issues and prep we should be thinking about.
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charlesyost
I’m really enjoying your daily POST’s!! Thank you for the free education!!
Long Live Analog!!
Paul McGowan
Thanks! Remember, at the end of the day everything is analog before we hear it.
doraldj
Hello Mr. McGowan,
We cannot thank you enough for sharing your vast audio knowledge with us. So far, you have helped us immensely – everything has changed – especially our speaker setup which was completely wrong. For one thing we had the imaging coming in front of the speakers when in fact it should be behind them (as it now is). For another thing you have also helped us with phasing (which was reversed – imagine that!) and now we are learning about servers and today have downloaded the guide you sent us. A million thanks! BTW, we also own a PS Audio Premier PSU and love it! We do have a question for you – why don’t you use tubes? We love the sound of tubes but PS Audio products for some reason do not use them. What do you have against tubes?
-Tristan
Paul McGowan
Thanks and I am glad we could help you enjoy your music more. I have nothing against tubes and in fact like the way they sound quite a bit – I just don’t think they are long term lived enough to put into our products – products we expect will be in service for decades.
Bassman23
Dear Doraldj,
Welcome to the Paul’s Posts family! I trust you have joined fairly recently, as Paul had a great series on the development of audio in which he delineated the growth from tubes to solid state. Please check the archives. BTW, I encourage Paul to look into actually publishing Paul’s Posts, as his daily missives are quite as informative, interesting and important as anything anyone is writing in the field of audio today. THANKS PAUL!
Paul McGowan
Thanks! Yeah, someday I might find the time or the resources to cobble all these ramblings together into a little book. That’s be cool. Appreciate the help and support.