Jukebox 2.0
By Heather Armstrong (from Dooce) on November 15, 2009
In the months after I graduated college and barely had enough money to buy dinner, I reviewed music for a local indie music magazine and received boxes and boxes of free CDs for review. And because I was music addict it was not unlike letting an alcoholic bathe in a tub of vodka.
As I moved away from that life into my life as a single woman in Los
Angeles, I started building my music library. I had around 500 CDs
before I started purchasing my music digitally. When my husband moved
in with me, he brought his CD library which was almost double my own.
This was great until we moved, and then moved, and then moved one more time. I credit carting around those heavy boxes of music for my superior upper and lower arm strength. I can peel a banana like no one's business.
This year, almost eight years after combining libraries, we finally imported all the music to a central hard drive to be our music library server. By digitizing all our CDs, we were able to get back into our music library and listen to songs we hadn't in years. Even a few years ago, this effort would have been overwhelming, likely having to split up the library or spend so much on a massive hard drive (or two) that the effort would be useless. About as useless as moving those boxes ONE MORE TIME.
We set up a computer in our kitchen and hauled every box of CDs out of the attic and into the living room. It took us weeks, I mean week after week after week of sitting down, inserting a CD and importing the music, only to repeat that muscle movement 2,000 times, but we got it done. We got rid of the scary cardboard boxes we had been lugging around for years and moved the CDs into more rugged storage and put them up in our attic. We can't bring ourselves to let go of them.
However, we've now got a much more useful music library and a way to quickly find that-song-from-1994-that-had-that-one-guitar-part-where-the-reverb-swallows-the-entire-band-for-three-choruses-and-then-there's-the-backward-loopy-thing.
We are SO thankful for quality yet cheap hard drives becoming the norm.
Back in 2000 or so, I started listening to music on my computer, but when I changed computers, a lot of that music got lost. We held on to our old computers strictly for the music on the hard drives. My husband finally got rid of the machines this year, removing the hard drives and rescuing what music he could. Why we didn't do this sooner is beyond my powers. But I'm so glad we did.
Here are a few tips to maximize your cheap hard drive and digital music life:
1) Get the biggest hard drive you can afford. Get another one. The first will be the one you put all your music on. The second will be a backup of the first. Invest in software that automatically backs up the main drive to the backup drive every day. The key is automatically so you don't have to do it every time you add music to your digital library.
2) Periodically verify that your backups are happening and make sure the drives are holding up. All hard drives fail at some point. The cost of backup drives is nothing compared to the cost of replacing your digital library of music!
3) Hook the hard drive up to a central computer or media server.
4) Hook the media server up to your home network (either WiFi or wired LAN).
5) Use player software that will let you stream from the media server/computer to either your computer or speakers throughout the house. There are several vendors who offer solutions, research the ones that fit your budget and computing choices.
6) Enjoy your home that can be filled with music at a moments notice.
It's amazing what music can do to energize a tired house.
Unfortunately,
this means that when we set the library to play randomly we are at
times assaulted by the occasional Steely Dan (my
husband) or Milli Vanilli (me, circa 1991 SADLY)
Plus, I can now share my Grease 2 soundtrack with my daughters. Having that kind of ability is one of the reasons that computers are so central in my life at home as well as at work.
_________________________________________
Heather Armstrong is an award-winning blogger, New York Times bestselling author and listed as one of the top women in media by Forbes.
This was great until we moved, and then moved, and then moved one more time. I credit carting around those heavy boxes of music for my superior upper and lower arm strength. I can peel a banana like no one's business.
This year, almost eight years after combining libraries, we finally imported all the music to a central hard drive to be our music library server. By digitizing all our CDs, we were able to get back into our music library and listen to songs we hadn't in years. Even a few years ago, this effort would have been overwhelming, likely having to split up the library or spend so much on a massive hard drive (or two) that the effort would be useless. About as useless as moving those boxes ONE MORE TIME.
We set up a computer in our kitchen and hauled every box of CDs out of the attic and into the living room. It took us weeks, I mean week after week after week of sitting down, inserting a CD and importing the music, only to repeat that muscle movement 2,000 times, but we got it done. We got rid of the scary cardboard boxes we had been lugging around for years and moved the CDs into more rugged storage and put them up in our attic. We can't bring ourselves to let go of them.
However, we've now got a much more useful music library and a way to quickly find that-song-from-1994-that-had-that-one-guitar-part-where-the-reverb-swallows-the-entire-band-for-three-choruses-and-then-there's-the-backward-loopy-thing.
We are SO thankful for quality yet cheap hard drives becoming the norm.
Back in 2000 or so, I started listening to music on my computer, but when I changed computers, a lot of that music got lost. We held on to our old computers strictly for the music on the hard drives. My husband finally got rid of the machines this year, removing the hard drives and rescuing what music he could. Why we didn't do this sooner is beyond my powers. But I'm so glad we did.
Here are a few tips to maximize your cheap hard drive and digital music life:
1) Get the biggest hard drive you can afford. Get another one. The first will be the one you put all your music on. The second will be a backup of the first. Invest in software that automatically backs up the main drive to the backup drive every day. The key is automatically so you don't have to do it every time you add music to your digital library.
2) Periodically verify that your backups are happening and make sure the drives are holding up. All hard drives fail at some point. The cost of backup drives is nothing compared to the cost of replacing your digital library of music!
3) Hook the hard drive up to a central computer or media server.
4) Hook the media server up to your home network (either WiFi or wired LAN).
5) Use player software that will let you stream from the media server/computer to either your computer or speakers throughout the house. There are several vendors who offer solutions, research the ones that fit your budget and computing choices.
6) Enjoy your home that can be filled with music at a moments notice.
It's amazing what music can do to energize a tired house.
Unfortunately,
this means that when we set the library to play randomly we are at
times assaulted by the occasional Steely Dan (myhusband) or Milli Vanilli (me, circa 1991 SADLY)
Plus, I can now share my Grease 2 soundtrack with my daughters. Having that kind of ability is one of the reasons that computers are so central in my life at home as well as at work.
_________________________________________
Heather Armstrong is an award-winning blogger, New York Times bestselling author and listed as one of the top women in media by Forbes.
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