Reactions welcome!
Music has often given my life a huge positive boost. Receiving a new CD, listening to an album you haven't heard in a long time and it's even better than you remember it or discovering albums you simply missed.( yes, that happens sometimes)
In my previous columns I have often explained how my CD collection came about and was built up, but for those who don't know yet, I would like to say again that I only keep CDs that I still think are good enough and so I buy regularly but sell just as easily. At least half of all the cd’s I have bought in my life are gone. Sold or given away. That's why I no longer need a separate room to store everything. I know that many of you have a very extensive collection of CDs or LPs and I understand that very well but the punch line is in the word collection. At least that's how I see it.
So now I buy all the albums I really want on CD and I hope to be able to continue to do so. I do worry about the fact that everything is increasingly going through downloads or streaming. Don't get me wrong, I sometimes use that too, but only to find out if I want to buy the album in question on CD, if it is still available.
In this column I want to explain how I work when a new CD arrives and I am curious if there are more people who do this or maybe something similar. I warn you that it may be shocking to some, a good friend of mine always looks at me in horror when he sees what I do. (sorry Paul)
As a semi-autistic person, I like unity so I decided years ago that I would store all CDs in plastic library sleeves including the booklet and backcover. That means that I cut everything up so that it is tailor-made and that is sometimes difficult, especially with the so-called digibooks. An additional advantage of this is that I use much less room on storage. I'm always disappointed when a CD is delivered without a separate booklet with the actual, correct cover.
Then I store all the cd's on the highest mp3 format in iTunes for which I use two different libraries on two different computers and I immediately make a backup of them on an external hard drive. This is mainly for the holiday(s) but also because of the possibility to make my own playlists. I make such a playlist with the idea that I can put together the ideal concert of the band in question and is therefore a maximum of two hours long. That is difficult because there are often so many good songs and drastic cuts have to be made and especially when a new album is added, hard choices have to be made.
Well, I won't be the only one who works with iTunes and I've been using it for many years, so I do have some knowledge of the system by now. Still, every now and then I'm puzzled when something goes wrong with importing an album. Sometimes I have to manually change the data because it is incorrect or contains spelling mistakes. Most of the time this works out well but not always. The data that are displayed when importing a cd in itunes are copied directly from the so-called red-book and is sometimes not correctable in iTunes and that is very annoying. After everything looks correct on my laptop I hook up my iphone and synchronise. When I go and see if all is transferred correctly I sometimes can’t find the album and it appears in the compilations section!? I do understand that this can happen when other artists have contributed to one or more songs but I corrected this in itunes so why does this happen? Although I have googled a lot, I haven't come up with a solution so far. I wonder if it really isn’t possible to overrule the red-book data or if my knowledge of the program is just lacking.
In my circle of friends I don't have anyone who can help me so this column is actually a call to people who know much more about iTunes than I do and maybe know how to solve this. Since today I have placed an option on the homepage to respond to everything that is on this site. It's wonderful to exchange ideas about music in a positive way and I'm curious if people will take the trouble to post a comment.
Reactions to reviews or columns are very welcome and I am also curious about your history with prog or about the way you are involved with music. Let me know! I will always try to answer but sometimes this can just take a while.