Re: The Sorrows of Record Cataloguing

On Aug 21, 10:41 am, "Matthew B. Tepper" <oyþ@earthlink.net> wrote:
"William Sommerwerck" <grizzledgee...@xxxxxxxxxxx> appears to have caused
the following letters to be typed innews:aoqdncQa7sS-yjDVnZ2dnUVZ_ovinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx:

In the meantime, you can go to Collectorz.com and purchase the Music
Collector software. I started indexing my collection several years ago, but
eventually gave up. The software is terrific, but the database (Grace Note)
isn't. The problem is that virtually every recording requires several
minutes' work to clean up and correct the entries. If you can index 10
discs an hour, you're doing well. There is also the issue of how to
organize your database, which I'm not going to go into here.

GraceNote is crap.  In addition to its inaccuracies, particularly the idiocy
of listing composers as performers and whatever else, There Are The Idiots
Who Insist On Capitalizing The First Letter Of Every Word, Including Articles
And Participles.  bah!

I'll stick with my Excel spread***, which I then save as a .csv file and
export to MobileDB, which synchs to my Palm.  What I would LIKE would be to
have a database application on my iPhone so I can ditch the Palm as well!  
Perhaps I'll try iDB Datamaster Pro, if I can customize the database display
in a manner that I find useful.

It is important to me that any such application for my iPhone have the
database reside actually within the phone itself and not on the Internet.  
There's no way I'm going to settle for accessing that 5 MB file over Edge!  
If there are geniuses who really think that "cloud computing" will take over
completely, then I think they should report back to the farm periodically to
have the straw in their heads changed.

--
Matthew B. Tepper:  WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
My personal home page --http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/index.html
My main music page ---http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/berlioz.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

Matt--
What happened with me is that I actually had EVERYTHING
catalogued at one time, back in the early 1990s. I had a D-base with
every LP, 78, reel and cassette completely indexed and with lots of
information. Then there was a burgulary, and the D-base walked away
with the computer. I had backed it up in early spring of that year,
but the lion's share of the work had been done in the summer, as it
generally is with teachers, and the thief came whilst I was at work on
mid-September. So a full half of more than 14,000 entires was lost.
In the succeeding months, other factors got in the way of restarting
the project, and by the time I was ready to again (2002), I was no
longer using a Mac, and had decided to ditch the D-base.
I got rid of the D-base, because I decided that all I really
needed was a list so that I wouldn't buy records or CDs over again.
This re-buying problem had become a real difficulty by then. So I
created a list by artist with every record with the artist's or
artists' name on it listed appropriately. This was particularly
useful in dealing with vocal 78s (where the re-buying problem was
worst), and also to an extent in handling the problem of the same
recording on many CD issues. At the time, in summer of 2002, I didn't
bother to keep a record of the 78 rpm sets, as they were easy enough
to see on the shelves and were in alpha-order by composer. Since
then, the Victor sets have been re-ordered on the shelves by album set
number and the Columbias and all the other labels have been shelved
separately from Victor. The Columbias and so forth are still kept by
composer (or artist occasionally - like "Szigeti plays Gypsy Melodies"
filed under Szigeti). The real backbreaker was taking every set off
the shelves (there are 1400+ sets), and no only entering them upon the
list, but also examining each individual record for condition so that
I could note in the list if records were cracked or broken or missing
those damned crescent-moon shaped pieces from the edge (between 25 and
30 sets were found to be in need of partial replacement, and so far
three have been in the last few weeks).
From the 78s, I rolled on to the LPs (almost entirely done now).
The CDs I began to list in 2002, but only got to doing the main
portion of them last summer. Between then and now, I did all of EMI,
BMG and what is now called Universal, though the labelling on my
shelves still says Polygram. In less than two weeks, I am back at
school and most of this work will come to a halt. By then I hope to
complete the LPs and do the Sony CDs, and maybe a few others
(Hyperion?). During the academic year, only newly-arrived records and
CDs are added to the list. Sometimes, during the school holidays,
some other things get catalogued, but not a great deal.
I made the decision long ago NOT to catalogue either cassettes or
reels -- unless they had been transferred to CDRs first. For those
recordings, there is an entirely different set of lists -- five lists,
to be exact, two that are chronological devoted to opera alone, two
devoted to concert performances and broadcasts of instrumental and
symphonic music, and one to Toscanini alone. Much to my astonishment,
this group of separate lists, if put together would be about half as
long as the commerical recording list, and that now comes to well over
700 pages.
What is striking here is that I do not consider my collection of
commercial recordings to be a particularly great one. There is at
least one correspondent here on the newsgroup who has vastly more CDs
than I do --perhaps all I have (about 8000) and a full half more
besides, many of them the extremely hard-to-come-by Japanese ones --
or more. I have a LOT of 78s that give me a great deal of listening
pleasure, and many of them are extremely hard to come by, but the
truly rare "money records" are seldom found on my shelves. Oh, there
are enough of them, but not to compare with the archives assembled
over the many years by people like Ward Marston, Donald Hodgeman, Ray
Edwards or Larry Holdridge -- all of whom have 78 (and, one assumes it
to be so in other formats as well) archives of greater size and more
excellence of content than mine.
To the obvious question: do you actually play all that stuff.
The answer undeniably is YES! Although some here ostensibly making a
name for themselves as sound engineers may quibble, Ward Marston
agrees with me that there is nothing that beats playing the original.
All one needs (besides the records, of course) is a pre-amp that has
the appropriate curves (KAB Souvenir does it for me), a selection of
styli for the various different sizes of groove and a decent system to
play them through. And, of course, the energy to get up and change
the record every few minutes -- or less if it's an LP or CD or tape or
whatever. It all certainly makes for great listening when I do it
critically, and creates an excellent ambiance to grade essays with.

Gene Pollioni
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