Greyhawks Digital Music Class – 1 – Introduction

Welcome to Greyhawk’s Digital Music Class. I decided to start writing some posts after several people (in the blogosphere and real life) asked me how I manage my (hedonistically large) music library. I’ll try to put these posts out there once in awhile, and I hope you get something out of them.

I’ll give you a little background on myself and on my music collection. First off, I’ve been a music fan since my first 8-track at 5 years old. I’ve always loved music, and have been a collector since I started saving money. In college I became a disc jockey at both the college radio station and the local 100,000 watt classic rock station. Through my (five) years of college, I did every job they had at the college station including two stints as the station manager. I also worked nearly 40 hours a week at the classic rock station. Sometimes it was commercial copy writing and production, but mostly it was on-air jocking.

During this whole time, I continued to amass titles in my collection. I would snag freebies any time I could, and at the college station, I worked with record company reps that liked me enough to send me multiple copies of every new release. That allowed me to have one and another could go to the station. During that time I also got on the guest list of hundreds of live concerts. The point it, music is a lot of what makes me, well… me.

I’ve tried a lot of things to manage the collection. In the past I’ve done things like have three 400-disc CD changers tethered together and to a computer to be able to manage it all. Besides the cost and the sheer size of that solution, it just became too cumbersome to find the music I wanted at any given moment. In recent years I’ve taken the majority of my music library and digitized it into MP3 format so I could catalog it and use it anywhere. This has freed my musical spirit considerably. I can listen to whatever I want whenever I want, and I can even transport almost my whole collection on a single 160GB ipod. It’s liberating. I’ll help you get to where I am, and avoid the pitfalls along the way.

In the next installment we’ll talk about how to get your current library into the digital realm, without DRM.