Editing Your Collection - How?
Fri, Feb 4 2011, 5:37PM
#2
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
That's an issue which is thrown up very often. The short answer is that - as I live alone - I can simply put composers into whichever country I 'see' as their nationality.
So - Chopin is under Poland; Hans Gal is under UK, Beethoven is under Germany etc etc. If I have some Sor, I'm not sure where I've filed it - but will have a look over the weekend...
Multi-composer discs are filed under the piece/composer I'm most likely to seek them out for. Artist-led discs which don't have a single country repertoire theme are in a cardboard box hidden away - I's only listen to these if I had an artist-led reason to.
The problem that prompted this whole discussion, though, is that those shelves are full - and many wonderful CDs are still being made.
Fri, Feb 4 2011, 5:40PM
#3
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Martin you may well have opened a mother of a wormcan. Asking people how they organise their record collections is leaving yourself open to being escorted through a land of neurotic insanity, scary and hilarious in equal measure.
I have my lps organised alphabetically by label, and by catalogue number within each label. I once thought about doing the same with CDs, mainly because those Naive monochrome CDs look great together, but it was a big mistake as there are a hell of a lot more labels these days. I had this bright idea on a work night, and I´m one of these people who can´t stop until I´ve finished something like this, it was 5 am when I hit the hay. Now I have them ordered chronologically by birth of composer. That´s the cleassical, I won´t divulge what goes on in jazz and rock for fear that someone will use what I say to have me committed.
Fri, Feb 4 2011, 7:53PM
#4
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Vinyl is boringly simple: rock and jazz alphabetically by performer, classical alphabetical by composer with opera off in its own section. Multi-composer discs sit at the end in an order which owes more to tradition than anything else.
CDs are organized by a formula to which only I hold the key. Hence the recurring complaint from the lady of the house, "Where's Joni Mitchell?" I suppose the reason is I bought various cd-housing devices over the years - drawers, carousels and some home-built shelving - and never bothered to reorganize from scratch. There's a rough logic - most of the choral stuff over here, opera there, Russian and eastern European in this section, jazz there, Sibelius hanging out together. But exceptions abound and yesterday I had to hunt for 20 minutes to pull together my solo guitar works. In the event of fire, if I tried to grab my most treasured discs before escaping I'd be toast.
Fri, Feb 4 2011, 8:12PM
#5
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
There´s a piece on Rob Cowan on the Radio 3 website, where he explains that he never files anything, because for him once it´s filed it´s dead, and he likes to be constantly surprised. Sounds interesting, but judging by the size of his collection, if he wanted to lay his hands on something specific he would have some problems.
Sat, Feb 5 2011, 3:40PM
#6
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
What a fascinating thread -- and what a bewildering array of obsessions, logic, self-justification, systems, rules and loopholes! Marvellous.
I'll just add two points that don't seem to have been already covered elsewhere.
(1) I'm a lot more relaxed about not being able to file things adequately or find them easily now that most of the music I currently want to listen to regularly is on my Mac. A swish of the finger on the mouse and I'm scrolling through scrupulously arranged albums of just about everything I want to hear. And if I can't find the physical counterpart, well I just burn another 'temporary' copy, along with a printed sleeve for a slimline jewel case.
(2) I also find that my listening revolves around fixations -- usually to the exclusion of other kinds of music. At the moment, it's baroque keyboard music. So I just ensure I know where all that is and play it to death until the next fixation grabs me.
OK, and one final point: 'editing' as used in this thread seems a polite euphemism for culling; but what about when 'editing' always seems to be about necessary additions....?
Sun, Feb 6 2011, 2:51PM
#7
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Having moved almost exclusively to downloaded 'software' based music (ie, flac, mp3 or similar files), I'm happily free of the problems of physical storage or 'one place' cataloguing.
Getting more music merely requires the occasional disk upgrade, and they're getting ever larger and ever cheaper. (I've just upgraded to 2TB disks for less than I paid for 500GB ones two or three years ago, and they should last me quite while now.)
It probably means I hang on to music that I may only have played once and may never play again - but the same has always been true in the case of books. (I regularly attempt a cull of books that I know I'll never read again, but almost invariably find excellent reasons not to dispose of any.)
And tagging allows the same piece of music to be catalogued and searched-for in multiple ways - by genre(s), artist(s), composer, conductor, orchestra, etc.
Yes, you do lose the booklet (at least in the rare-ish cases when the booklet is worth having), but quite a few labels now allow you down the notes as a PDF file.
And you also lose the physical presence - CDs, like books, do rather furnish a room; flac and mp3 files do not.
But I think the advantages hugely outweigh any disadvantages.
Sun, Feb 6 2011, 9:18PM
#8
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
This is a very pertinent subject for me. I am going to be moving house, once I've actually sold the present one.
When I last moved, I had a modest collection of a few hundred CDs, ditto LPs. In the ensuing 14 years, the number of CDs has mysteriously grown to something like 2,000. When the estate agent came around to look on Friday, and saw the shelves of CDs, she screamed. She is a woman. 'Move them into your spare room, out of sight', she said. Easier said than done. She even spotted a few hundred DVDs against the back wall of the living room that I hadn't noticed before. In fact, as I will be renting at my next address, I've decided it might be easier to move them there first, then put the nicely emptied house up for sale. Yes, there's the matter of paying rent and mortgage simultaneously, but I can (fortunately) do that for a couple of months. After all, I could sell a few CDs.
Do people have any other ideas? (No, I do not want to put them onto computer or Brennan, end of subject).
Regarding filing systems, I used to file alphabetically until it became impossible. Last year I reorganised, and now I group CDs by record label. This has thrown up an interesting fact; whereas at one time, it would have been EMI/Decca/DG/The Rest, now, after Naxos and EMI, the biggest labels in my collection are Dutton, BIS, Hyperion, Chandos - far more than Universal, and the pathetically small number of Sony/RCA.
Mon, Feb 7 2011, 10:46AM
#9
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
I posted this under a different thread before reading this fascinating one and have moved it across.
My solution to my ever expanding CD collection is to archive on the i-pod and hen wait until I have a bigger house. I do find I listen to more of my music this way.
I have now filled my 160GB I-Pod and have a particular approach to arranging it:
- I use the "genre" tag to arrange into those genres used in the gramophone magazine i.e. vocal, opera, instrumental etc
- I fill out the "artist" tag as the conductor unless it is a recital disc and then I use player or singer (I also group these separately under separate "recital" genres so as to be able to shuffle across e.g. a number of opera recitals)
- I use a three letter abbreviation for the composer at the start of the title and abbreviate longer words and forget the key e.g. Moz Symph. No.39, Mlr Das Liede Von Der Erde - this helps flick through the albums when I wish to browse my whole collection. So I start with Abz (Albeniz) and go through to Web (Weber).
- I place a space after titles with the same name e.g. Str Vier Letze Lieder(space) and Str Vier Letze Lieder (space) (space) so that they appear as separate album titles - took me ages to work that one out!!
- I don't use the "album artist" or "date" tag but I do use the "composer" theme
- I have "album art" which also helps when browsing
While this works fairly well I wondered if anyone had any cunning means of arranging their music. I would love an excuse to go messing about with it all over again!
Mon, Feb 7 2011, 10:24PM
#10
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
I hope you've backed it up! I recall reading few articles in the papers somewhere about hard drive failures in big ipods.
P
Wed, Feb 9 2011, 11:50AM
#11
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
You cannot throw any of them out.
Think of what you will be missing. Suddenly, after 30 years you suddenly have a desire to listen to that original Tennstedt CD, say, that cost a lot of money at full price (no internet in those days) and it's not there any more.
Gone. Taken to a boot sale, given away...and, now, you find you cannot do without it, although it was taken from the original LP and contained a mere 40 minutes of music.
To avoid such frustrations one has simply to get a bigger house as the local Planning authority is unlikely to approve further extensions to the existing one.
Oh, and what about all those lovely box sets that are coming on the market to celebrate Liszt's bi-centenary? Unavoidable.
Decisions, decisions, always decisions. Something, or somebody, else has got to go.
Wed, Feb 9 2011, 1:06PM
#12
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Just a few thoughts in response...
Interesting Dubrob should mention that Rob Cowan video. Just after I'd sorted my storage facility and spent weeks cataloguing, I saw it - in which RC amusingly quips that the moment you 'organise' your collection you kill it. You can have it both ways though, and keep pockets of 'organised disorganisation' away from the main collection.
Alun - I agree on fixations. Albert Imperato's blog on Danish composers yesterday means I can go straight to 'Denmark' in my collection and immerse myself.
sc1234 - I also agree with you that I don't want to store things
digitally (sorry Martin!) however much I continue to benefit from the
digital revolution.
That's what makes this so hard - troyen1 is right: when you say goodbye to something, you really do say goodbye to it. Again, back to editing (culling) techniques: there always seems to be a reason not to dispose of something.
I had a go at solo Chopin last night - felt I had to keep Fialkowska (because recent reviews have been so good), Freire (becuase it's Freire), Alexandre Tharaud (because I've always liked him), a ZigZag recording (because the product is so beautiful), Perahia (becuase this month's Gramohpone is so persuasive on it), a handful of classics...and so on...
Is that just lack of self-discipline?
Fri, Feb 11 2011, 10:50AM
#13
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
Is that just lack of self-discipline?
Hmm...editorial latitude, surely?
Fri, Feb 11 2011, 3:23PM
#14
RE: Editing Your Collection - How?
This thread prompted me, at last, to dispose of that pile, albeit small, of CDs that have been hanging around for , ooh, I don't know how long.
I could have put them on a swap site but they would have been there forever, I'm sure.
My justification, nay-excuse, was I can always buy them again. I tell myself that that will never be the case.
I still have a small pile that I just cannot decide on (I can always buy them again?!).
Tue, Dec 13 2011, 3:51PM
#15
RE: The Brennan JB7
Hello,
There is a new and updated user manual for the Brennan jb7. This manual also includes a new section on how to record from vinyl. The manual is available via the official Brennan website, it can also be downloaded in electronic format via the named link provided below.
User Manual download - http://www.brennan.co.uk/imagprod/BrennanManual.pdf
Official website - http://www.brennan.co.uk/
Official support website http://brennan.kayako.com/
kind regards,
John
Brennan Customer Service Team
That is absolutely fascinating. I can see that you've tried to generate a thematic logic, with lines of development through the recordings, which works for you - a not entirely dissimilar aim to my approach (though a lot more imaginatively realised).
Though just out of interest, where would someone like Chopin go? Or, to draw in the guitar, Fernando Sor, who left Spain part way through his life, never to return, and became part of the French and English music environments?
Editor, Gramophone