Upcoming: Building A Digital Audio Libary

Looking to build a digital audio archive that will sound great and last a lifetime? Stay tuned, because I'm going to cover this topic in detail during the weeks to come.

Over the past few years, I ripped our entire CD library to disk. It was an immense task: I now maintain an archive of more than 12,000 tracks on a PC disk array, all of them properly transcoded and tagged. One of our PCs is designed specifically to function as a music server; after a great deal of trial and error, and quite a bit of research, I settled on an audio card, music management software, and other components that meet our needs.

In a series of upcoming posts, I'll share what I have learned with all of you. The tips I'll provide aren't the only way to build and manage a digital audio library. But I consider them the best possible solution for us, and I think they will benefit quite a few other people, as well.

There are plenty of online sources for this type of information. I'll try to add value here by sharing my own thought process, rehashing some of the mistakes I made along the way, and explaining exactly why I made my decisions.

Perhaps most important, I will do my best to present all of this information in a clear, concise, helpful manner -- something so many other sites try, and often fail, to do.

Stay tuned! We'll start the series in a few days with Part One of what I think of as my "Ten Commandments" for any serious digital music archivist.