Well, as you probably know by now I’ve been preparing for building a music server so that I can archive my substantial CD collection into cases in the basement.  I have spent the last week ripping CD’s into .flac files and stowing those on an extra 500GB drive I have temporarily mounted in my main Ubuntu desktop machine.

I have torn through most of my collection.  There is a stack of maybe 30 classical CD’s I haven’t done yet, and there are a few straglers which I will have to enter the information by hand (since they are apparently obscure enough not to be represented in these on-line repositories of CD information).  Once done with these my entire store-bought collection (in the neighborhood of 750 ablums or maybe 850 discs) will be sitting on this drive coming in around 235GB.

This has kept me rather busy, even if it’s been in a fundamentally mechanical manner.

On a side note, I recommend that every one of you goes out and joins one of the various database sites for music.  I have joined Music Brainz for no real preferential reason.  There are others; many others.  (Post your favorite in the comments.)  Pick one (or more) and join.  And then login and fix some of your favorite album information.  Currently, though these sites are great repositories of information about albums, they are filled with silly little errors: track names which include the artist name, misspelled band names, miscapitalizations of all kinds (Art of Noise; not Art Of Noise—only important words get caps in English), &c.  I think they must use bots to farm this data initially, and then they rely on human intervention for the drift toward perfection.  Just a theory, mind you.

But seriously, you don’t have to be a programmer to help out the spirit of open source.

Anyway, you’ll likely see some more posts about this digital music adventure as I get time to write them.  I have already posted a couple.

Man, it sure is nice to have my entire music collection never more than a couple of mouse clicks away.

Happy hunting.