Introducing: the Music Library Management e-book!
September 04, 2012 in digital music by Dan Gravell
After several months of writing, reviewing, redrafting and re-writing I'm able to present to you: the Music Library Management e-book! This e-book is a distillation of what I've learnt from the past sixteen years of organising computer music libraries and is aimed at those new to such collections.
Over the past three years of running the bliss project I've received a lot of email, and not all of it is about bliss. Plenty of the email I receive are general discussions about digital, computer based music and requests for advice as to how best to organise and structure computer audio collections.
When some family members recently purchased a Sonos device I was the de facto, go-to guy for helping them get set up. It suddenly clicked: with more and more people joining the computer audio revolution, wouldn't it be useful to collect together basic pieces of advice to help people with their new music collection?
Sure, you have resources like this blog and plenty of forums on the Web, but that requires searching for the information you require, and you don't always know what to search for. More convenient would be an all-in-one resource that you can print or read on your e-reader or tablet in your lounge as you are working with your music library.
And so, I decided to distil the basic rules of computer based music library management into an e-book: the Music Library Management e-book. The book runs to about twenty-five pages and is absolutely free (free as in beer and in speech, more on this later).
What's inside?
The book is divided into four main sections:
- Acquiring new music to add to your library
- How best to store your library
- Organising music: tagging, album art, file structure
- Ways of protecting your music library from damage
I thought that covered most bases.
The book itself is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA 3.0). In plain English this means you are free to download, copy and distribute the book yourself, and even make changes so long as the resulting work is distributed under the same licence. The only caveat is where you distribute or adapt the book you must give me (Dan Gravell) an attribution. I'd really prefer it if that included a link to the book's landing page.
Let me know what you think!
So go ahead, download the book now and share it with others you think will find it useful! I am always open to new suggestions for the book and new topics to cover in a potential future second edition!
