This was thrilling news, as gmusicbrowser was my favorite large music library manager for Linux back in 2015. Back then I’d published an article after discovering the application and had described it as, “a robust utility with impressive handling for libraries in excess of 100,000 tracks, and best of all – a fully-customizable interface.” Sadly, development of the application halted several years ago and the Ubuntu Software Center retired it in favor of the simpler but powerful Clementine application. If you’re curious, Slant.co published a detailed side-by-side comparison of the two applications here.
While not available from the Software Center, installation is manual but fairly simple for Ubuntu users by downloading the .deb package at http://gmusicbrowser.org/download.html.
This however was only half the battle for me, as I had painstakingly crafted a custom application layout for gmusicbrowser to let me browse my library by folder structure and by multiple points of metadata all at once. I dove into my archived documentation and was elated to find that I’d taken detailed notes on how to install the custom layout I loved step by step.
From my notes, I saw that the layout mine was based upon was titled “laiteAraknoid2” – one of several layouts included in a package formerly available from vsido.org. Sadly, the download link from 2015 was long-since broken, but ever-the-archivist, I found that I had downloaded and saved the package to my local file system along with an instruction guide I’d written on how to restore it!
I followed my six-year-old instructions to the letter, and was overjoyed when the next launch of gmusicbrowser instantly restored my custom tweaked version of the layout along with all my folder configuration and user settings! The entire process took fewer than five minutes! All that was left to do was rescan the library for all the content I’d added in subsequent years. Three hours and 45 minutes later I was all synced up and ready to go.
Here is a snapshot of the layout with one of my primary audio folders selected. I have a little tidying up to do with some of the metadata but that’s an advantage of this layout scheme, as I can quickly identify and correct stray tags. This will empower me to explore my library anew! Such a great way to begin the fall season!
I have a decent starter-collection of jazz vinyl, focusing primarily on Miles Davis’ catalog including the 6LP Miles at the Fillmore box set, as well as a selection of the better quality big band box sets on wax. But I’ve been working on building the digital portion of my jazz collection, the larger box sets of which total 1,626 albums. These highlights help me add a sense of order to the 22,000 jazz recordings in my digital library.
To date, my focus has been on essential classics, vocal jazz standards, the crooners, tin pan alley, jazz pop (1920-1960), highlights of avant-garde jazz, the big bands, swing, a bit of ECM, future jazz (in the electronic realm), film noir scores, gypsy jazz / jazz manouche, and their related subgenres. I’ve been in the mood to explore The Great American Songbook, (jazz vocal standards by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ellington, etc), so I started doing some research.
I’m no jazz expert, but some preliminary Google searches, list-generators, and review surveys provided me with sufficient information to begin building a respectable personal library. One intriguing release offered for sale on Toronto’s JazzFM website was an astonishingly large 500 CD box set called, The World’s Greatest Jazz Collection. Of course, due to licensing restrictions, the set lacks some of the classic milestone recordings which come to mind when such a title is raised, but the sound quality and sheer volume of the collection warranted its addition to my library.
The 500-CD World’s Greatest Jazz Collection comprises five 100-disc sub sets:
100-CD Bebop Story box set
100-CD The Big Bands box set
100-CD Classic Jazz box set
100-CD Modern Jazz box set
100-CD Swing Time box set
Next I tackled building discographic archives of key figures in the history of classic and modern jazz. Larger jazz artist discographies in my archive include but are not limited to the following:
156-CD Thelonious Monk discography
135-CD Keith Jarrett discography
100-CD RateYourMusic.com’s Top 100 Future Jazz LPs
98-CD Miles Davis discography
78-CD Jimmy Smith discography
75-CD Sun Ra discography
61-CD Ornette Coleman discography
52-CD Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers discography
43-CD Herbie Hancock discography
43-CD Jimmy McGriff discography
40-CD Duke Ellington discography
35-CD Charles Mingus discography
30-CD John Coltrane discography
22-CD Dave Brubeck discography
16-CD Future Sounds of Jazz box set
as well as the 16-CD Diana Krall discography. (My late father was a fan and sparked my interest in her catalog when I was starting college.)
And as I’ve discussed in former features, I worked hard to build analog and digital archives of the finest big band collections ever issued to the public. Some of these were exclusively available from mail order subscription services on vinyl and later on compact disc, but thankfully, archivists around the world have painstakingly digitized the vinyl-exclusive volumes and produced complete digital libraries of these sets at professional archival quality.
In my Big Band Archive I have:
30-LP box set of Time Life: The Big Bands
27-CD Ken Burns Jazz Series and Jazz: The Story of America’s Music (22-CD + 5CD)
11-LP box set of The Great Band Era
10-volume Benny Goodman Collection
7-volume The Big Bands box set
4-CD Smithsonian Big Band Jazz archive
2-disc Glenn Miller Gold Collection
1-CD The Glenn Miller Orchestra Collection
Other smaller and more precisely-focused jazz collections in my library include:
8 CDs from the Jazz Moods series
6 of the essential albums by The Bill Evans Trio
6-CD Gypsy Jazz / Jazz Manouche box set
5-CD 100 Hits American Songbook box set which includes one hundred standards recorded by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Shirley Bassey, Sammy Davis Jr, and more.
5-CD Film Noir jazz series collection
3-CD Complete Recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
and the single-disc Complete Recordings of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
My collection is leagues away from exhaustive or complete in the vast scope of the world of jazz – an insurmountable task for certain, but I’ve done my best to construct a modest library showcasing the key subgenres I enjoy most. These will provide me with years of listening enjoyment on lazy Sundays and on my afternoon drives queued up in the car from my personal media server.
In an effort to determine the best recordings to sample first, I began compiling various “best-of” lists. Rateyourmusic user erikfish found 22 “top jazz albums of all time” lists in books, magazines and web sites and combined them into one meta-list here. And TheJazzResource.com compiled a similar list of the Top 25 Jazz Albums of All Time. Spinditty published a feature on Ten Coltrane Albums Every Jazz Fan Should Own and NPR put together a similar roster called The Cocktail Party Guide To John Coltrane. I also assembled some of my own lists including Modal Jazz Essentials, Recordings of the First Great Quintet (Davis and Trane in ‘56), as well as 17 Essential Hard Bop Recordings courtesy of critic Scott Yanow and a Top Ten Essentials list of Thelonious Monk LPs.
I would love to hear your recommendations for your favorite titles from the collections mentioned above which deserve priority listening, or your suggestions for other collections which would complement my current library. If I’ve any glaring omissions, please let me know! I’m always eager to learn.
With Thanksgiving off from work and the whole day to myself it felt like the perfect opportunity to run some metrics on my archive to provide me with some valuable insight as to the development of my larger libraries just in time to close out the year.
And it couldn’t have come a more fitting time, as I’ve been filled with inspiration and have been actively expanding my archive thanks to the magnificent ambient soundscapes showcased on the syndicated radio program, Hearts of Space.
I maintain a complete broadcast archive of every transmission of the program since 1983 – over 1200 hours of ambient space music. These tone poems accompany me for eight hours every day at the office, and all through the night as I sleep. (For someone as hyperproductive as I am, this music is a godsend as it helps to quiet my overactive mind.)
Captivated by these contemporary instrumental works, I’ve spent the last few months compiling complete discographic archives of the artists featured on the program, many of whom have over one hundred albums in their respective catalogs spanning the history of ambient and space music. It’s a labor of love, and infinitely rewarding as I enjoy the company of their music all throughout my waking and restful hours.
I had previously compiled a digital archive of all official and unofficial Tangerine Dream releases, including the Tangerine Tree live recording archive totaling 298 discs of electronic ambient music.
Soon thereafter I assembled a complete discography of the 45 releases by modern classical composer Harold Budd. I’ve loved his soft-pedal technique ever since I first heard his collaborations with Brian Eno.
Inspired by the Hearts of Space program I continued this effort by building a lossless library of the 72 releases by veteran ambient composer, Robert Rich. Rich has been featured on 84 transmissions of Hearts of Space and is a staple figure of the genre.
From there I built an archive of the 161-album catalog of his collaborator and Hearts of Space favorite artist, Steve Roach. Roach’s recordings are informed by his impressions of environment, perception, flow, and space and are considered to be highly influential in the genre of new age music.
Next I compiled a complete 100-album discography of the late master of Tibetan singing bowls, Klaus Wiese. Wiese played tamboura on Popol Vuh’s classic Hosianna Mantra and Seligpreisung LPs and is considered by some as one of the great ambient and space music artists.
I then secured a 149-disc library of the German dark ambient / drone ambient musician, Mathias Grassow. His Wikipedia entry notes that “[his] music often has a meditative and emotional and spiritual context, which induces deep feelings of introspection in listeners.”
I did the very same for the Berlin minimalist composer Andrea Porcu, who performs under the moniker Music For Sleep, and for UK experimental artist 36 (a project of Dennis Huddleston), and for other prominent figures of the genre.
These explorations directly resulted in a number of physical media investments like the Hearts of Space first transmission LP limited to 500 copies worldwide, Robert Rich’s Premonitions 4LP box set (also limited to 500 copies), and the limited edition Nighthawks / Translucence / Drift Music autographed vinyl box set comprising the complete collaborations of Harold Budd and John Foxx.
I last published a feature on my playlist projects five years ago so it seemed like a good idea to recalculate the number of albums and total runtimes for the artists and record labels representing the largest segments of my library as a means of both organizing large sets of data and to serve as a reminder of catalogs I still need to explore in full. And while the former project from 2015 included large-scale genre maps I thought that this time it would be more productive to focus on specific artists, producers, and record labels specializing in a particular sound to highlight large libraries in my archive.
So that tabulation is consistent and equally weighted across various collections, I’ve calculated totals based on the total number of discs, so that a 30-disc box set weighs accurately against a single-disc release.
I factored collections of greater than 20 albums as being eligible large libraries. I was going to render a set of graphs of the results as I did with large playlists in 2015, but given the sheer number of eligible sets I felt that the data is most clearly expressed in a basic table. This list of approximately one hundred artists accounts for roughly 1% of the artists in my library, but over 75% of the total albums cataloged.
Here are the results, organized from largest to smallest libraries. I’ll divide the results into three categorical sets – first complete artist / record label discographies, followed by libraries of old time radio broadcasts, and close with box sets of audiobooks.
Here are the discographies:
Largest Discographic Archives by Artist / Record Label:
# of Discs
Hearts of Space Radio Broadcast Archive
1232
The Progressive-Kraut-Psych-Avant garde Rock Collection (Vols I-VIII)
753
Underworld
600
The World’s Greatest Jazz Collection
500
Psybient DVD Packs Map
317
Tangerine Dream and Tangerine Tree Live Archive
298
Big Band Music Digital Archive
259
FAX +49-69450464 Catalog (Pete Namlook)
254
The KLF / Kopyright Liberation Front / JAMS / Justified Ancients of Mu Mu / The Timelords
189
Steve Roach
161
Ninja Tune Records
154
Mathais Grassow
149
Future Sounds of London & Amorphous Androgynous
141
Lemon Jelly
137
Keith Jarrett
135
Max & Dima: Sapovnela Studio Sessions
131
Throbbing Gristle
131
111 Years of Deutsche Grammophon
111
Miles Davis
109
Daft Punk
104
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno
100
Flea Market Funk: Funky Soul & Rare Groove
100
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
100
Hit the Brakes DJ Series
100
Klaus Wiese
100
RYM Top 100 Downtempo / Trip Hop LPs
100
Sigur Ros
100
Nurse With Wound
99
Franz Liszt
97
Thelonious Sphere Monk
97
Good Looking Records: Archive of LTJ Bukem’s Intelligent D’n’B Label
94
Deuter
89
Franklin Mint’s 100 Greatest Recordings of all Time
Moog Indigo: Classic Albums of Space Age Bachelor Pad Music
31
Claude Debussy
30
John Coltrane
30
The Flaming Lips
30
Chant Ambrosien: Sacred Music From the Middle Ages to the 20th Century
29
Music For Sleep (Andrea Porcu)
29
Kruder & Dorfmeister
28
Moondog
28
Cabaret Voltaire
26
William Basinski
26
Son House: Walkin’ Blues (The Complete Recordings)
25
Top 25 Psybient Ultimae Records Releases
25
Autechre
24
36 (Ambient Composer Dennis Huddleston)
22
Biosphere
21
And the Old Time Radio series:
Old Time Radio:
# of Discs
Dragnet
298
The Adventures of Superman
171
The Goon Show
168
X Minus One (1955-1973)
122
CBS Radio Mystery Theater: The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
83
BBC Radio: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
79
The Shadow (1937-1954)
75
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Audiobooks
60
Flash Gordon
26
Orson Welles Mercury Theater 1938
20
And Audiobooks:
Audiobooks:
# of Discs
Ray Bradbury
425
Isaac Asimov
348
Douglas Adams
268
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
207
Philip K Dick
124
HP Lovecraft (Dark Adventure Radio Theatre Complete Programs)
17
The next libraries I intend to collect are Conny Plank’s 122-release extended discography, Dieter Moebius’ 65-album map, Hans-Joachim Roedelius’ 115-release catalog, and the 126 releases by Klaus Schulze, Pete Namlook, and Tetsu Inoue.
This new data will prove to be immeasurably useful for my annual reports and as a mental bookmark of large libraries I’ll continue to explore throughout my work days and subliminally while I sleep each night. And I have exciting new listening equipment arriving in the weeks ahead which will further enhance my sonic experience so stay tuned for an exciting feature to kick off the year 2020!
It’s been a magnificently productive day at Innerspace Labs and we’ve reached what is to date our most prestigious milestone. I published a feature last March about the evolution of my life-long list-making of sound works, cinema, and literature that I’ve been meaning to explore. These lists also served to touch upon some of the special collections in my archive.
In the previous article I described how this process began with leather pocket journals, and as the scale of my library grew I began to publish annual print editions itemizing large collections.
These efforts were radically transformed several years ago when I migrated to Google Drive. But as the years passed and spreadsheets and documents multiplied, it rapidly became apparent that I needed to consolidate all of these various lists into a single, deep searchable index otherwise countless lists would be forgotten and disappear into the digital void of my Google Drive.
Thus began the Innerspace Labs Master Workbook project this past spring. Though this venture posed several new dilemmas. As the workbook grew to nearly 200 tabs, I received this error stating that Google Workbooks are limited to 5 million or fewer cells.
And it quickly became evident that navigation of all those tabs was painfully arduous in the mobile environment, as was its loading time. Thankfully, after careful research into various potential solutions, I’ve implemented a system of scripts and formula expressions which make navigating this large workbook a snap and its interactive response time nearly instantaneous.
By combining over 200 named ranges, and incorporating a primary dynamic drop-down and a dependent secondary drop-down field, along with an “=INDIRECT(CONCATENATE” expression calling named ranges based on user input, I’m now able to hide and lock all but one master sheet and made the entire workbook navigable from that single homepage.
The home sheet offers the user a primary drop-down of LITERATURE, SOUND, or VIDEO, which in turn controls a secondary dependent drop-down to populate and auto-alphabetize a list of all related content for that category.
I’ve also employed a script which is triggered by Google Clock to rescan the entire workbook for newly-added lists and to automatically incorporate them into the search fields alphabetically and by category as the workbook continues to grow.
I understand that it may not have significant value to anyone other than myself, but it’s intended to serve as a reference document along with the over 200-pages of archive summaries I’ve drafted in a companion Google Doc. With this easy-to-reference Workbook, I can pull up a list in seconds and start exploring. My hope is that the project helps introduce me to some spectacular content and that it helps me rediscover forgotten areas of my library.
The next phase of the project is to apply uniform formatting to all lists, as these were drafted independently over the course of nearly a decade, so I apologize for the crudity of its present format. And of course, there may be errors or omissions among the lists. But you know that I’ll work tirelessly to make this project as accurate and accessible as I can.
Here is a link to a copy of the latest version. It showcases and attempts to organize ~26,000 of the most noteworthy elements of my personal library and related subjects of interest. All cells are locked for editing except the two dynamic drop downs, which is sufficient for general users to explore and interact with the document. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a labor of love that I will continue to work on and which I hope will enrich my life as it continues to expose me to some of the greatest works of the ages.
February has been a whirlwind of productivity and I’m excited to share the results of my efforts. Thus far I’ve introduced five projects. First I discovered that the disk snapshot solution I’d been employing for my server would no longer work at its current scale, so I had to research and implement a new solution. Once that was a success, I set myself to the task of merging and updating two music database systems I’d created years apart on two different operating systems. That was an incredible challenge.
For as long as I’ve been breathing, I’ve been compiling and organizing lists of all manners of subjects. I thrive creating order from chaos – chronicling and curating media of the 20th-century. As a young man, I penned lists in leather pocket journals but was frustrated by the fixed and static state of the data one committed to the page. I quickly graduated to Microsoft Office and then to LibreOffice, and by 2013 began self-publishing books of collected lists and spreadsheets to document the progress of my archive.
But the true game-changer came when I adopted the Google suite of apps, most notably Google Docs, Sheets, and the Google Keep task manager. These applications introduced undo history, increased accessibility, and most importantly, shareability to my list-making efforts.
Still, the seamless convenience of Google Drive came with a caveat – scores of lists once generated were quickly forgotten, and the sheer number of them made Google Keep and Google Calendar reminders cumbersome and an ineffective method of managing them at this scale. What I came to realize was that dozens of quality sets of information were disappearing into the digital black void of a Google Drive overrun with lists.
That’s what inspired this latest project. I decided to survey my entire history of list-making, compiling databases created in a wide array of formats and constructed on multiple platforms over the years, and to merge them all into a single workbook on Google Sheets. It was an incredible challenge, as the formatting of the data varied tremendously from .M3U to .PUB to raw .TXT to .XLS to proprietary database systems built for Windows XP (OrangeCD), to web-based database systems like Discogs and Goodreads which each offered .CSV exports.
To depict folder-structure-based organizational systems, (commonly employed for artists and label discographies), I utilized tree -d list.txt for large libraries. To extract %artist% and %title% metadata from RYM toplist playlists I’d constructed, I developed a spreadsheet combining four formulas to pull nth row values and to truncate “#EXTINF:###,” expressions and file paths from .M3U lists outputting a clean list of tracks.
In October of 2017 I’d authored The Innerspace Labs Journal: A Listener’s Guide to Exploration in Google Docs as a contextual survey of my larger collections. It spans eighty-four pages and includes an active hyperlinked TOC with an X.XX indexing structure and served my needs well for the past two years, but for simple down-and-dirty lists a spreadsheet seemed like a more accessible format.
And so I constructed this latest effort – The Innerspace Labs Media Exploration Master Workbook – a cloud-based 180-tab set of spreadsheets combining all of my list data into a single, searchable, sharable index with a hyperlinked Table of Contents for easy navigation. The interface is intuitive, it loads lightning fast on even the most modest of systems and across all browsers and platforms, is mobile-friendly, and it will continue to grow as new content is introduced to my library.
The TOC is segmented into four primary themes:
Literature and Essays
Cinema and Television
Sound Pt 1: Music Surveys, Best-Of Lists, and Guides
Sound Pt 2: Artist Discographic Chronologies, Audiobooks, and Old-Time Radio Dramas
While a few of the tabs contain hyperlinks to lists from multi-page sites which do not send themselves well to text extraction, I’ve done my best to embed as much of the information as possible locally in the workbook, itself and to keep the layout consistently uniform to facilitate navigation and clarity.
Unlike the self-published books or the somewhat daunting length of the Journal, this workbook is simple and localizes the data a viewer is most interested in exploring to a single, plaintext sheet for quick and easy reference. The shareability is key to aiding curious listeners/viewers in finding quality content relevant to their interests, and it is simultaneously a tool to empower me to delve into the many areas of my own library which I’ve yet to explore.
This is a milestone for Innerspace Labs, and I will continue to refine and expand the project into the future.
I was recently contacted by Dan Gravell, founder and programmer of the server-based music management software, bliss. Bliss received praise from Andrew Everard of What Hi-Fi and their official website calls it a tool “for people who care about their music collection.” Dan posed several questions about my library, and about what differentiates an average personal music collection from a true archive. He suggested that my response might prove useful as a journal entry at Innerspace Labs, so I’m sharing my response for others who might ask the same questions about their own meticulous collections.
So let’s dive right in –
Regarding the difference between run-of-the-mill “playable” music libraries and what one might call an “archive,” there are a few primary factors which could differentiate the two. The first is one of practical function and intent. If a library is for personal use for playback alone it is most likely the former, whereas a consciously organized collection of significant size and scope which is representative of a particular period or culture and which sheds contextual light on that era might serve a greater, almost scholarly purpose as an archive. Uniformity of structure, organization, navigability, and accompanying supplemental metadata enhance a library such as this to greater usefulness than mere playback. And it appears that it is precisely this focus on consistency by which Dan has endeavored to empower users like me with his bliss project. Another important factor is the long-term sustainability of an archive, which I’ll touch upon momentarily.
Next Dan asked whether my source media is exclusively physical. My collection comprises only a few thousand LPs, with a significant focus on the history of electronic sound. This spans the gamut from early notable works of musique concrète to the Moog synthesizer novelty craze, all the way through the international movement of ambient electronic music. I’ve also a predilection for archival box sets, like the Voyager Golden Record 40th Anniversary set with companion hardcover book and the special release from The John Cage Trust, as well as the previously unreleased collection of Brian Eno’s installation music issued earlier this year on vinyl with a new essay by Eno. But the bulk of my library is digital. This is both for practical and financial reasons, as digital libraries are far easier to maintain. (I don’t blog about digital nearly as often, as 450,000 media files are nowhere near as fascinating as a handsome limited edition LP!)
Dan also inquired about my workflow, which is critical to any archive. Early on in the development of my library, (around 2002-3), I began ripping LPs with the following process:
Exclusive analog recordings are captured using a Denon DP-60L rosewood TT with an Ortofon 2M Red cart, powered by a McIntosh amplifier (later replaced with a vintage Yamaha unit), and are saved as lossless FLAC via an entry level Behringer U-Control UCA202 DAC. I previously utilized a Cambridge Audio DacMagic DAC but after it failed I opted for the Behringer and it has been more than sufficient for my needs. Audio is captured using Audacity on my Linux-based DAW and basic leveling and noise reduction are performed but I minimize post-processing to maintain as much of the original audio’s integrity as possible.
Dan specifically inquired as to where the library information was stored (barcodes, etc) and asked about my policies on which metadata are included. This is fairly straightforward, as nearly all of the vinyl recordings I ripped pre-date the use of barcodes or were limited private releases with only a catalog number, which I bracket as a suffix in the release folder path.
Polybagged LPs are stored vertically and organized by primary genre, then by artist, then chronologically by date of issue. Due to the entropic property of vinyl playback, discs are played once as needed to capture the recording and subsequent playback is performed using the digital files. I employed a dozen static local DB applications over the years for my records, but eventually migrated to a Discogs DB which increases accessibility while crate digging in the wild and provides real-time market value assessment for insurance purposes.
But honestly, I almost never need to perform the rip myself, as the filesharing ecosystem has refined itself to the point where even the most exclusive titles are available through these networks in lossless archival FLAC with complete release details. There has never been a better time to be alive as an audio archivist.
Once digitized to FLAC, my assets are organized with uniform file naming conventions with record label and artist parent folders and parenthetical date of issue prefixes for easy navigation. gMusicBrowser is my ideal playback software for accessing large libraries in a Linux environment. Release date and catalog numbers have been sufficient metadata identifiers, as subsequent release details are only a click or a tap away on Discogs. Occasionally I will include a contextual write-up in the release folder where warranted, like in the case of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops 9LP + 5CD + DVD set as it related to the events of 9/11.
Next Dan inquired about how my archive is accessed. I employ Sindre Mehus’ Subsonic personal server application on my Linux DAW to make all of my audio and music video film content accessible from my phone, tablet, or any web-enabled device. I use both the official Subsonic app and the independently-developed Ultrasonic fork by Óscar García Amor for remote access of my library, (about eight hours daily). You can see a short video walkthrough of the features of the app that I put together here:
To return to his initial question about what differentiates a playback collection from an archive, my own library incorporates a few key factors which might lend itself to the latter:
– lossless bit-perfect FLAC wherever possible
– index documentation
– a systematic process guide for new acquisitions
– a 76pp manual highlighting special collections and large libraries of the Collection
– disk mirroring in multiple physical locations for preservation and sustainability
– fire protection for further indestructibility
– routine disk operation tests to mitigate risk of data loss
– complete discographic record label chronologies suffixed with catalog numbers
– elementary data visualizations created using Gephi and Prezi web-based tools
– the use of TrueCrypt whole disk encryption to prevent unauthorized access
– and the active use of Subsonic and Ultrasonic for enhanced accessibility
And scale is another noteworthy factor in my circumstances. Just to cite one example, I’ve collected every LP and single issued by the electronic duo Underworld that I’ve been able to get my hands on, and the digital audio branch of my Underworld collection comprises 482 albums, EPs and singles, including 2850 tracks and DJ sessions totaling well over 385 hours of non-stop music, spanning 36 years of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith’s work in all of their many incarnations. This collection is uniformly tagged, organized into a network of categorical root folders, and substructured into chronological subfolders by date of release. And the complete record label collections are a definite differentiator from the majority of casual-listening libraries.
I understand that my archive is small compared to the 12-20 TB libraries of some more seasoned users, but I feel that discretion and selectivity are virtues of my personal collection so that I can focus on only the most exquisite and remarkable recordings of my principle genre foci.
So what about your own collections? Do you employ standardized uniform file naming conventions and organizational standards? Do you supplement your library with relevant documentation to add context to your media? Does your collection offer insight into a particular era or musical culture? And do you take measures to ensure the longevity and sustainability of the work? If so… you might just have an archive.
Supplemental Note:
A good friend was kind enough to offer his thoughts about what sets an archive apart from other collections, and his remark was too good not to share. He said –
I think another major difference between the average personal collection and an archive is retention and adaptation.
A casual listener or collector wouldn’t have the retention of a true archive. The individual may build some playlists or even some advanced structure for locating and listening to music, but there is a very good chance that after some time, that particular music will get buried by the newer, or the most current thing the user is listening to. The casual listener may not want the huge or growing library, so when they feel they have moved on, the music will be removed from their collection. I cannot see someone who is keeping an archive remove anything from their collection. So retaining the entire collection and not removing anything because they are bored with it would be a difference.
I also mentioned adaptation. This is a rather basic idea but would be rather important in the grand scheme of things. Lets say you have a collection of 100 songs, all with 4 points of meta data. You realize as you begin to add more songs to your collection, a 5th point of data is needed. A casual listener may leave those 100 songs in the current state they’re in, with the 4 points of data. The archivist would need to go back, and add that 5th point to all 100 songs, and the new ones. Add another zero to those numbers and that can be a daunting, but necessary task for the archivist.
This summer brought many changes to The Innerspace Library. First we started fresh with a Linux OS and finally said “farewell” to Windows. There was a brief period of limbo as I tested various open source media management software to find the right fit for my collection. I finally settled down with gmusicbrowser which outperformed Clementine and other major players in its handling of large libraries and in the incredible versatility and customization of its GUI.
This was the very first time since the launch of Winamp 5 (the amusing successor to Winamp 3) that I’d explored the power of music metadata to organize my library dynamically across multiple data points. (I’d never really saw the need during my years with MediaMonkey Gold.)
But as the summer drew to a close, I was still irked that my Subsonic media server lacked the function of genre browsing. I’d previously sidestepped this issue by generating mammoth genre playlists to serve as my personally-themed radio stations, each with hundreds or even thousands of the finest albums of their respective genre.
But it was this fresh start in the last few weeks that inspired my refinement of those playlists into distinct album libraries which would zero in on a specific moment of music history. The aim was to bring a semblance of order to the hundred thousand plus tracks in my file library and to give me a set of starting points to really explore the neglected and unplayed folders of my drive.
I’m proud to declare that this evening, the project was a complete success. I’ve created 100 all-killer-no-filler libraries showcasing each of the largest collections in my catalog. I found that 68% (9,300 albums) of my music library fell neatly into one of these 100 categories.
The following is an index of these 100 playlists, sorted by number of albums. This roster effectively summarizes and gives order to what is otherwise an insurmountable archive. I’m going to enjoy exploring these playlists throughout the fall and into the winter months.
Playlists by Descending Size (in # of Albums)
Playlists with 1000+ Albums
Midnight on Mars: Ambient Worlds – 2,986 Ambient Albums
Hearts of Space: Innerspace Journey – 30 Year Complete 1,069 Broadcast Archive
Playlists with 200-999 Albums
Kelly Watch the Stars – 607 Classic Albums of the Downtempo Genre
Mentalism: Psybient Dreams – 545-Disc Archive of Psybient Electronic Music
Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio – 450 Legendary Krautrock Albums
The Shape of Jazz to Come – 387 Modern Jazz LPs (1959-1979)
Just Gimme Indie Rock!: 379 of the Greatest Indie Rock Albums (1988-2014)
Underworld: Dark & Long – A 35 Year Chronology – 339 Albums from Screen Gemz to Eno & Hyde
Old Time Radio: Dragnet (298 Broadcasts)
Salute to Birdland – 259 Classic Jazz Records (1924-1958)
FAX +49-69450464 Label Archive: The Legacy of Pete Namlook 254 Disc Catalog
We Came to Funk Ya – A 227 Album Funk Odyssey
Ninja Tune: Turn Me Loose – 204 LP Archive of Ninja Tune Records
Playlists with 100-199 Albums
Days of the Lords: 195 Album Archive of Ethereal & New Wave, Gothic Rock, Minimal Wave, Post-Punk, Jangle & Noise Pop (1976-1997)
The KLF: Abandon All Art Now – 189-disc Catalog of the Justified Ancients of MuMu
Shirt Tail Stomp: Swing & The Big Bands – 181 LP and Broadcast Archive
Tangerine Dream: Journey Through a Burning Brain – 178-Disc Chronology of TD & its Side Projects
Old Time Radio: The Adventures of Superman (171 Broadcasts)
Night Lines – 140 Album Archive of Deep House Sessions
Light Patterns – Jazz of Tomorrow – 139 Future Jazz Albums
Heaven or Las Vegas: 30 Years of Dream Pop & Ethereal Wave (134 Album Archive)
Max & Dima: Sapovnela Studio Sessions – 131 Deep House DJ Sets
Nurse with Wound: Walking Like Shadow – 127 Album Discography
Old Time Radio: X Minus One – 122 Broadcasts (1955-1973)
Deutsche Grammophon: 111 Years of DG (111-Disc Box Set)
Lemon Jelly : Going Places – 110-Disc Catalog of All Things Jelly
Miles Davis: The Complete Prestige & Columbia Recordings – 109 LPs released between 1955-2014
As I entered the final days before I move into my first home, I began to contemplate the changes to the sonic space of my studio. I anticipated that the new space would likely be devoid of external noises and the familiar nuanced sounds of other persons moving about in the residence. I also considered the longing I’d felt for the bustle of a metro village cafe – something I’ve yet to find locally befitting of an eccentric like myself.
So it appeared I’d a new project on my hands – to archive a bank of ambient noise to calm me and to promote productivity in my new home. Astonishingly, (as I’d never searched YouTube for ambient field recordings before), there was an incredible bank of 6-10 hour environmental recordings available, and all of it for free. I extracted the audio from each, archived my favorite selections, and put together a playlist for my readers to sample for themselves.
The playlist includes:
the sounds of drafting a dissertation in a university library
various intensities of rain in a variety of environments, from city streets to the inside of a vehicle in evening traffic, and from a tin roof to the inside of a camper’s tent
room-expanding noises from several coffeehouses.
and it ends with a soothing, 8-hour train ride
Explore my playlist below. I’d welcome further recommended environments if you have any to share!
My server is down for maintenance for the next 16 hours. It was a perfect opportunity to begin my next long term music project.
When Innerspace Labs first switched to the cloud, I used the web-based RacksandTags service through my OrangeCD DB to create an index of all track information from my library. Collections on the service can be searched by artist, album, or track, but lacks support for 2nd level organization like genre clustering, playlists, and other more valuable data points.
I later switched to Discogs.com. Discogs offers real time market value assessment of your collection, but only supports physical media. I was also disappointed to find that user-generated category foldersare not presently shareable with other users. As I prepared for the downtime last night, I realized that I hadn’t given Last.fm a shot since I wiped my account clean in 2014. That year I scrobbled 30,000 tracks, but was frustrated that there was no way to submit all my library’s data without playing every track in real time.
My goal was to explore the service’s recommendation engine, and my library data would likely produce some valuable results.
So last night, I went to work. I quickly realized that the best approach would be to queue all 100,000+ tracks and to scrobble them in order of ascending track duration. I organized the songs into four pools of nearly equal size. Below is a map of my library based upon these four classes – less than five minutes, less than ten minutes, less than thirty minutes, and up to 24 hours.
As the largest batch was that of the shortest tracks, there would be the greatest (and fastest) return from scrobbling these first.
I charted the play duration of each of these groupings to see what sort of timetable I’d be looking at for project completion.
Graphing the duration of each grouping clearly demonstrates that this was in fact the best course of action.
I began scrobbling immediately for the first time in a year. Once the project is complete I’ll share some of the resulting recommendation data Last.fm provides. I’m looking forward to it!
The final task in my transition to a Linux environment was to customize a powerful music library manager and player to work for my needs.
The most intriguing contender was gmusicbrowser – a robust utility with impressive handling for libraries in excess of 100,000 tracks, and best of all – a fully-customizable interface.
This evening I came upon a magnificent library of gmusicbrowser interface layouts from vsido.org with an accompanying step-by-step installation guide. After about 30 minutes of perusing the 40-odd layouts bundled in the collection I came upon one which wowed me. A few minor tweaks later and I found myself with a large library manager and player with an incredibly powerful interface which permits me to fully-indulge my metadata fetishism.
Have a look – this is better than anything I had Windows-side! Highly recommended for Linux users with archival collections!
The Innerspace Connection 
