Well, clearly, G, one should not do as I did and use the hard drive as the primary library, and wait to delete what has been archived to CD until one has about a floppy's worth of disk space left. :~) Ooops! Honestly, I had no idea how much space I had gobbled up in the last 3 months' mad grab as I ravaged new, exciting sources.
And I also had no idea what I wanted the end result to look like, or how I might use it. (If I had, this would not all have piled up.) Did I want CDs that could play in anything, or did I want MP3 CDs that would hold lots of stuff? Both, for songs I want our band to have a chance to hear and choose from for our own use. So I chose to save in formats that let us hear, primarily, the TUNES. I'm not bootlegging entertainment music-- I'm researching songs to propose to the band. Most of these are items I have lyrics for, or can find them, so it's the tune and the overall sound style we're after. That means that for us, sound quality itself is secondary, so I can go ahead and store things in lesser-quality formats and review them later and, if I want the band to have them, make them up as compilation CDAs at that time.
So here's my next question.
2.
What does your end result look like, how do you use it, and did you revise your procedures/software as you went, as you got a better idea of how you wanted to use the archives?
What I am doing is this. If it comes to me as a WAV and I think the band will like it, it (and anything that came in as an MP3) is now archived directly to CDA. Then I squish it down to lower-quality MP3s and toss batches of those onto CDs. Any MP3 material I might have saved before reviewing goes straight to MP3 storage for later review (during aquatic workout time).
I delete the folders as the CDs are made, and spend a couple of days doing that till I have a lot of chair time to check that all the CDs are OK and then to copy them. I use the running time to edit and standardize the playlist, and the playlists start from existing text files. I find it is faster to make just the one copy when I create the CD, and to do the making of the second copy for offsite storage, later, on a day I am doing only that. Once those are checked, batches of original folders are dumped from the Recycle Bin, by date of deletion.
The CDs are numbered with a filenaming convention that incorporates the approximate date I acquired the songs. No paper labels, just Sharpie marker numbers and brief description. I'm storing it all in binders, with the cloth-lined plastic pockets, and I got a good price on those from a local vendor. I'm using good quality D-ring binders. The playlists are given the same names, and are printed, stored in the front of the binder. When I get caught up and have a nice empty HD I will put the playlists on CDs too and store them.
The end result will be a library to play from for my own use at home and a second set offsite from which I can make lending copies for the band to borrow. Until I could see that the library should be housed at church, in some office space I will carve out, it was all pretty overwhelming.
Right now, to find a song to work up, I am using Windows search functions to tell me where I have a copy of the song's sound file, lyrics, chords, MIDI, etc. It's actually working very well for me to do that-- with the creative titling in gospel music, I use the same creative searching approach you would use for a Mudcat search and what I get is a screenful of results much like a search here among the threads.
In the past week I have archived about 15GB onto a LOT of blank CDs. (Some of the offsite copies are done already too.) I've learned some new software and some new tricks with software I had, and I can see a routine settling in as I continue exploring sources. For the balance of 2004 I will probably not change how I am doing any of this, or try to learn any new software... I need to get busy using what I have, not be sitting here learning how to store it differently. Next year tho I want to learn how to use the indexing/filenaming stuff some of you are using.