Technology kills the radio star - Part 1 of 3

Part 1 of a 3 part series describing how to create a portable digital music library from CD's, records and cassette tapes


In 1979, The Buggles proclaimed that “video killed the radio star”. It turns out video left them mortally wounded. Technology, as described in this three-part series, kills the radio star.

Music is a luxury many people enjoy. Music lifts spirits, accentuates sorrow, and makes us laugh and cry. It gives us pace when we walk, solitude when we wish. With primitive roots, music, for those who appreciate it, is as integral to life as beer.

But what do you do if you can’t access the music that has influenced your life. After a lifetime purchasing and enjoying 45’s in youth, albums starting in teens and then evolving through cassette tapes to CD’s, there is a lot of influential music that doesn’t fit into today’s portable players. The project presented here takes all this music, stores it on a dedicated fileserver and makes it possible to load portions of the collection onto a portable music player.

The solution is possible thanks to a merger of technologies. The three software elements described are Exact Audio Copy (EAC), LimeWire and MediaMonkey. Required hardware includes a computer with a CDROM reader, a large back-up memory and a portable player, like the Blackberry. The biggest decisions are storage format, how to name files as they are stored and where to put the (digital) collection.

There are a lot of music standards available, the most popular being mp3 and iTunes. Speaking with people who have been down this path, FLAC format was recommended. Free-lossless-Audio-Coding (FLAC) is a method for compressing music files. Compression is important because it reduces the total disk-space required to store a song. Lossless is also important because it maintains the audio spectrum required to maximize fidelity. By contrast, mp3 significantly reduces both file size and fidelity. It’s alright for low quality portable players but given the level of effort required to convert a music collection, it’s not a job that wants to be done twice. Do it right the first time and keep the highest quality.

Naming files is a personal decision. I first started downloading music after listening to KFOG’s top 500 songs from A to Z nearly a decade ago. I decided I wanted to be able listen to songs alphabetically. To do this, I start the filename with the song title, then the artist; for example Let it Be – The Beatles. This is a major departure from many people who start with artist, as in The Beatles – Let it Be. In this format, playing songs alphabetically gives all the songs by the same artist. Either format is fine.

Leaving Spaces in filenames isn’t recommended. Some computer operating systems won’t tolerate the space. To avoid this insert an underscore. This changes the filename to Let_It_Be_-_The_Beatles. The final consideration involves naming songs on albums. Some albums, like Dark Side of the Moon are structured and flow better in order. How many times have you listened to a song fade and remember what the next song is on the album? To allow albums to be played in order add the track number at the start of the file. The final format I choose looks like this:

06-Let_It_Be_-_The_Beatles.flac

Where Let it be is the sixth track on the CD

I organized my collection using file directories. At the top level are the artists: Animals, Barenaked_Ladies, Beach_Boys . . . Within each directory are the files for each album, for example:

o Pink Floyd ->
- Animals
- Dark_Side_of_the_moon
- Ummagumma
- Wish_you_were_here

Within each directory are the filenames for the music, which can be ordered by track number.

Finally a decision needs to be made about storing the music. My modest collection has over 3000 songs so far and occupies over 50GB. I have a Linux server with 300GB available. All files are first downloaded to a laptop and moved to their own segment on the server where it’s easy to perform backups. The other advantage of a server is that I can access the entire collection anywhere on the network.

Another option is an external hard-drive that connects to your computer through the USB port, they are relatively inexpensive and easy to configure.

Next step – Recording music