an introduction…

This will be a blog covering specifically digital music file collections. The topics that will be covered here include: building, managing, and enjoying your music collection. For instance:

• I will cover different methods to fix your collection (adding tags, cropping audio files, or removing duplicates).
• I will also cover software and web sites to help you manage your music collection.
• Music genres is also a subject in which I will be writing.  Music genre is a big topic when dealing with music collections because we must map digital music files to one, or more, genres.
• I will touch on the problems when tagging music files.  For example, songs with several artists, such as mashups.  Or songs with several versions (ie, live, remix, acoustic).

I started my digital music collection around the late 90’s when mp3’s became popular, about two years before the term mp3 became a household name with the help of Napster. My collection now stands at around 80GB. I do not restrict my collection to one particular genre. My collection spans from hip-hop to classic rock, from drum and bass to alternative, from swing to r and b, and everything in between.

The goal is to have a perfect music collection system. This ‘perfect’ system is a collection where every single file has been properly tagged and rated, there are no file duplications, you can get to any song in your collection within a second.   This ‘perfect system’ should also discover new music for you. I am in no way near this ‘perfect system’. However, I have many ideas on how to get there and, hopefully with your help, we can all arrive to this ‘perfect’ system.