Originally posted at http://digitaldiatribes.wordpress.com on February 9, 2007.
It is entirely possible that nobody will care about this post. This may be an example of me just having a journal entry. Despite this fact, I will nonetheless forge ahead and attempt to break new ground in the blogging world by announcing the completion of my music database. Whoa! Hey! Settle down a little bit. Relax.
Allow me to recap the history here, which should give you some insight into why I’m an actuary. I’ve been known to have a certain desire for organization on certain things. Mind you, this is not an attribute that apply across the board. For example, if I have a pile of clothes in my closet, I can live with that. For three years now, our bathroom has had paint peeling on the walls. I’ll get to that someday. But when it comes to other extremely important things, it drives me crazy to have a lack of order. One such thing is my music collection. And so it has been since my youth.
I love music, and I started collecting it back in Junior High. My first tapes (CDs did not exist) were from 6th or 7th grade, I would guess. I used to tape songs off the Weekly Top 40 with Casey Kasem every week. Those were the days! Anyway, I never would get rid of any of the songs, just buy more tapes. Eventually I started expanding to LPs and the such, and before you knew it, I couldn’t keep track of what songs were on what tapes. More importantly, it was a pain in the proverbial neck to try and continually re-alphabetize everything. And so, in my pre-teen ingenuity, I developed a record-keeping system. Amazingly, this system would serve me for over 20 years, through my high school, college, and DJ years.
Here is that system: Assign every tape a number. This is the Tape ID Number. Write it on the tape. In a notebook, in numerical order, write down individual songs on the tape if it was a variety of songs. If an LP was on the tape, simply record the name of the LP. In a separate notebook, assign each LP a numerical ID. Write the names of each song for each LP in the notebook, along with a cross-reference of the tape number on which you can find the LP. Finally, in an index-card holder, by alphabetical order according to artist, list any LP owned by that artist along with the LP ID number.
For something developed as a youngster, it worked pretty well, although whenever I tried to describe to someone what I was doing when I was trying to locate a song, they thought it sounded too complex, and that I needed to get a life. Keep in mind that computers did not exist in those early years.
Well, there was one great drawback to the method. When I wanted to find some random song, it was difficult to do in the event that it appeared on a soundtrack or variety LP, or if I wasn’t sure of the name of the artist. This would sometimes happen with DJ requests when someone would request a song. I had so much stuff that I had no idea if I really owned it. Even if I did know I had it, but wasn’t sure which album it was on, I’d have to check under multiple LP ID song listings to find it.
Well, a few years ago, I decided the time had come to create a music database. Every song would be typed into an Excel Spreadsheet (with its own song ID, of course), and I would immediately be able to find it through sorting, or searching for it. The database has, with each song, the location of any tape or CD (both of which have an identifying number) as well as the name of the LP it is found on, the artist, etc. This may not seem like a huge deal, but here are the numbers: 1700 cassettes, nearly 600 CDs, and almost 19,000 unique songs later, I am done! Woo hoo! This pinnacle of accomplishment occurred 3 days ago.
Two nights ago, ByTheBook wanted to listen to Fur Elise, because she is learning to play it on the piano. I went to the database, hit CTRL-F, typed in “Fur Elise” and in microseconds had the information I needed: Location on tape #951. With a victorious cry, I screamed, “Look at the time this saves me!” (This ignores the countless hours spent typing in all the information, but please just let me have my perceived victory, OK?)
And so, one major project ends. From now on, of course, any new CDs will need to make their way into the database, but that is not a major ordeal – certainly no more difficult than entering the information in two notebooks and on an index card. I feel a major sense of accomplishment, but there is also this lingering question bouncing around in my head. “How am I going to waste countless hours now that the database is complete?”
I’m sure I’ll come up with something.
