Managing your liner notes / CD Inserts

[Bob Martin]

Hello All,

I just got a B2 and I'm a couple of hundred rips in!  Does anyone have a creative thought on how to keep your liner notes available?  All I can think of is removing them from the jewel case and filing them alphabetically for future reference.  Maybe it's just that simple?

I plan on safely storing the CD's and Jewel cases.

Thanks.

--Bob.

[JFBUK]

Hi Bill,

when you say liner notes are you looking for the full text of what's on the insert/booklet or just credits and brief notes ?

I keep my ripped CDs with their inserts though I have moved them from jewel cases to thinner sleeves and use something like the Discogs website if I want to look something up about a track.

Discogs is handy way to catalog your collection as well

e.g.

https://www.discogs.com/Led-Zeppelin-Untitled/release/9195245

John

[Daniel Taylor]

Discogs often has pictures of every page of the artwork inserts.  But a lot of the time, the notes are so small they're not easy to read.  That's the type of thing that I wish artists would add to their web pages, but I don't remember coming across that very often.

[JFBUK]

The redoubtable Discogs elves do upload a lot of track & credit info as text though :)

[Bob Martin]

Thanks for the advice!  I've finished ripping most of the discs.  I pulled some speakers out of mothballs and connected them direct. What a treat to be listening in full resolution stereo.  It's been years!

[Gregg Moore]

Hi John;

Discogs is handy way to catalog your collection as well

     I'm curious as to how you accomplish this. 

Is there a way to attach such a URL to an album on a B2? 

Or are you simply going to Discogs whenever you need to know something about personnel, studio, dates, etc.?

gregg

[JFBUK]

Hi Gregg,

You will need to set up Discogs account, you just need your email address.

Its free, they make their money from acting as an online marketplace similar to EBay

If I want to add something that I own I just type in the CD or LP catalog number in the search box to retrieve  the details from the Discogs database.

You can then add the entry to your collection which is stored by Discogs.

The downside is that there can be seemingly be many versions that match for some CDs or LPs.

In part this is down to some contributors being pedantic about technical details such as particular pressings.

The contributor community is its strength though as I have only had one occasion when I could not find something I own already in the database and the keen contributors are constantly revising and tweaking stuff.

You can manage your collection online, nothing particularly sophisticated but adequate.

You can export your collection to a comma delimited CSV file for download. 

This is a background task and you get an automated email when it is ready for download

There is a unique URL for each entry in the main Discogs database but not for your individual collection. 

https://www.discogs.com/Moby-Play/release/3541509

So in theory its possible to attach a URL to an entry in an external database such as the B2

Hope this helps

John

[Daniel Taylor]

If I could add to the Wish List:

A method of storing a URL of our choosing for every album, in its corresponding folder.  And a way to invoke it from the WebUI, that would open a new tab in the same browser at the address of the URL.  All the B2 would have to do is launch the new tab, no other interaction would be needed.

I envision sitting back in the comfy chair controlling the B2 with the WebUI on a tablet, and bringing up the artwork and liner notes by clicking on the URL I'd previously stored with the album info.  This would make the change over from many CDs to single box complete by including the artwork (or whatever else we wanted to store a URL for).

[Warren Knauer]

Daniel--Would splitting your "Wish" entry out be helpful?  

I think your idea would be fantastic, provided there was some flexibility or at least a provision to paste a URL.  That way, one could even generate a URL to cloud storage files such as held in Microsoft OneDrive (etc) as that can provide URLs for any uploaded file--so you could URL into a pdf, an XLS, etc.

Good on you!

Warren

[JFBUK]

Hi All

it appears that Musicbrainz already has the capability to store multiple URLs as attributes of a Musicbrainz database entry.

As the B2 is already using the Musicbrainz identifier (MBID) to identify CDs maybe the wish is:

1. The B2  stores the MBID in its database of music when a CD is ripped

2. The MBID can then be used to link through to other resources already stored in Musicbrainz ?  

This may be more viable programmatically outside of the B2 using a NAS connection to retrieve the MBID ?

3. When the B2 cannot identify a CD and therefore does not know the MBID there is the facility to enter it manually.

Couple of screenshots to illustrate what I have discovered. I used Pink Floyd - Animals as my example.

John

[Warren Knauer]

JFBUK--thanks, good to know. Frankly, I'd prefer being able to add our own URL given that I may want to use it to link to a photo or other personal things (scanned ticket image, etc)--plus, the B2 would be stronger if not even more dependent on musicbrainz--obviously just my 2 cents here

Cheers

Warren