Audio Editing and Archiving

Description

I could go on and on about this topic, but I think it really merits a blog post. Digging deeper into musical interests in the 90s meant archiving CDs, and searching for a lot of music that could only be found on vinyl, or the Internet. I spent a good portion of the year 2003 archiving thousands of CDs. At the time, EAC was a good tool to create either a .WAV copy, or a lossless and compressed copy using early tools like Monkey's Audio Codec which was a pre-cursor to the .FLAC format (it was actually more efficient at compression). I spent a lot of time creating custom meta data tags using J. River Media Center which was a cutting edge tool at the time. In the end, I ended up with a large archive of about 500,000 files (music and spoken word, lectures, and poetry). I could configure or filter view schemes based on the content, cull out tracks from multiple-artist compilations to reside with a specific musician's other albums, and easily compare different releases of recordings; it was like having a museum of music and I was the curator. This was long before Spotify, Tidal, and Amazon Music, and there is something to be said about maintaining such a collection (maybe it says "a little crazy"), that, and the music keeps playing when the Internet cuts out.