It’s also compatible with pretty much all music software and hardware playback devices. This set of descriptions is embedded directly into each music file – so you don’t have to keep track of the information in separate databases. (Otherwise we can’t sort and find stuff easily.) The system we are going to use is highly customizable, but we also want to be organized and use the same pattern of descriptions for every single track we archive. Information like the album name, track title, track number, artists name, the year it was recorded, the musical genre – and optionally much more.

As you can imagine, this is a huge labor savings right there, and helps to ensure consistency in our library.Ī: Sometimes also called “tags” – it’s nothing more than descriptive information – mostly text – that describes things about your music. Our music will be automatically organized – as we rip it – into directories/subfolders which will be created automatically with the Artists names, followed by the Album names. Our filenames will be created automatically with friendly names like the track number and title, so when we see it on our hard-drive we know exactly what it is. It also automates information gathering so we don’t have to manually type in all the titles we want for our music. Its UI is a little dated, but it has been maintained very well over the years, is still under active development, is a fully mature product, is very efficient at the job we are going to do and has excellent metadata mass tagging abilities which will help us keep our music organized. We’re also going to use a free open-source program called FooBar2000. It’s compressed like a ZIP file but can be read and played directly by player software and devices. We use it because it’s widely compatible with most advanced music players, and because it’s a true bit for bit copy that can be safely used if we need to convert to other formats. It’s a free to use open source music file format. We are also going to use free open-source tools to rip the CD’s, and to encode them into the formats we want.Ī: FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. (It’s a lot of work!) To that purpose, I will show you how to use an open-source format (FLAC) that is an exact copy of the original, to use a work-flow process to keep these files manageable, and to use automated open-source data tools (music tag services) to make light work of what many fear most: making sure the filenames of the music files make sense. We want to do this right the first time so we don’t have to do it again in the future. More info: ĬD ripping: Making a digital archival or backup copy from a music CD to a file on a computer. The legal version of the above says the same thing succinctly in twenty-two chapters using seven syllable words. Don’t download music other people ripped for their personal use. Don’t ask your friends for copies of their music that they archived. Don’t borrow CD’s, rip copies of them, and return the originals to your friends. Don’t give away or sell the original CD’s afterwards – but store them in a cool, dark, dry place. Excuses like bags-o-holding disappearing are not acceptable defenses.ĭon’t pirate music don’t loan or share your originals (after making copies) and especially don’t upload or share the copies themselves. If you don’t have the originals anymore you are expected to delete your copies. You must possess the originals to legally keep your archival copies. Let us assume you are making personal copies of Compact Disks that you own to play on personal devices for yourself. I am not a lawyer, but here’s my non-lawyer-speak personal understanding of how the law in the United States treats copying music CD’s you own. AKB4000010: A Guide to Archiving RedBook Standard Audio CD’s

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