7/17/03
I *am* a central repository of digital media, or at least I hope to be. I have over 1.8TB of hard drives and buy more all the time, confident that Moore's cousins in the HD business will grant us the one extra order of magnitude we need for true library-like status before too long. I've also bought some for the sole purpose of "long-distance USPS-powered sneakernetting" -- ask Traaaf how he likes his 120GB :)

All I have to ask is: as long as we're going for something that's somewhat centralized, perhaps even "official," let's be absolutely sure we do it right the first time. I recently deleted 10k+ mp3's and 500+ movies from my collection because I wanted to start over and build things my way from the ground up. (Good timing! ;) )

For me that could only mean one thing: calibrated EAC -> Monkey's Audio; meticuluously catalogued, sorted, and tagged (virtually none of my discs are in the CDDB); cover art added; CUE files, EAC logs, and important liner notes (e.g. conductor, soloists, recording location & engineering, even stuff like mics used when appropriate) saved to the album directory; you get the idea. Space is so cheap it's practically free; art is priceless. (And while my time may not be, as long as I'm spending it I want to do so the "right way.")

Being my own librarian has been in my blood for a long time...the P2P ideal intrigues me, but I now know better than to ignore the beat of my own obsessive-compulsive drummer. This is not to say "my way or the highway," but I've become increasingly convinced that distribution/publication and archival are more distant than your average Napsterizer thinks, in terms of both purpose and methology.

In particular, I'm going to be a lot more receptive to helping broadcast independent art than going down (even if only in my own mind) as someone who helped perpetuate the corporate machine's mindshare. But frankly, you don't affect either of those by mailing APE'd hard drives -- the battle on the archival front exists solely for my own pleasure. It's a relatively small piece of the (admittedly still amorphous) <b>cultural puzzle</b>, but one that will be important to some people's appreciation of art. Let the Eisners of the world keep thinking the benefit the digital age brings them is the ability to sell our souls to get our Mickey fix on a subscription basis∞...we know better, right?

I'm starting to get philosophical and link-crazy, which is never a good thing for the longevity of a thread. I could write a few thousand words on the topic, but the basic gist of it is here -- scroll down∞. My only quibble with the long post at the bottom is that all my links were to commercial software, though it wasn't without reason. We may have a cool synth∞, and promising developments toward a DAW∞ and NLE∞, but there's no reason liquidity should be limited to electronica: for the forseeable future I'll still need Mic Modeler (and dare I admit it, AutoTune) to sing a cappella covers, Finale to transcribe and arrange tunes for brass quintet, GigaStudio to conduct my fantasy symphonies...

Back to CollectedWritings