Very impressive.  Great job.

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davidmahler said:

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tjkurita said:

Hey David,
 
I am about to pull the trigger on these Can Am drawers.  What do you recommend color-wise?  I am planning on starting with a two drawer on top of a three drawer (5 drawers total) configuration.  And expanding into another 5 drawer stack to put next to it when it becomes necessary.  That's a lot of real estate for the eye to look at.  Getting a color is probably out of the question as it would be too strong.  So that leaves black, light gray, dark gray.  What color(s) are you using?  You have a lot of them I'll bet and I wonder what the whole thing looks like. 
 
The option I am thinking of is gloss textured black with a walnut mica top. 
 
Any advice you can offer on color choices in Can Am drawers would be helpful. 

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My drawers are black, I believe they're gloss finish, but they may be matte finish, they have a grainy texture.  I think you'll like them!
 

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Ordered my Can AM drawers, David!  In Storm Gray.  It's the lighter gray color with a matching mica top.  One set of three and one set of two, with metal legs. 
 
Boy, these thing set you back...  I really think they will be worth it, but for about one dollar per CD, they are expensive. 
 

Wow!  Just mindboggling dedication. 
 
Why even have a day job?  This night job of yours would certainly pay, given the immense depth and breadth of your knowledge and resources to date. 
 
I am gonig to take the plunge now that I have a Macbook Pro and nearly 175 CDs...best if I get it started before I spend the rest of my time playing catchup.
 
You da man, David, on this thread....just really appreciate the effort you took to share.
 

Applause. Seriously good stuff there. 

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davidmahler said:

By the way, just for the record, I'm 27...will be 28 in a few weeks
 

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I have to say that surprised me - would have thought your collection would have had more Madonna than Mozart!
 
Really great effort - I am currently wrestling with iTunes and a collection of only around 3000 songs and it is driving me up the wall.

Nice setup DavidMahler, do you use an iPad/iTouch as a remote or the tiny remote that comes with the Mac?

Both!  usually the apple remote though.....the new one is aluminum and looks nicer than the old.
 
Thanks for the compliment too

You have too much time on your hands, man!

I've got a similar setup, but I find Front Row to be too limiting. I'm tagging as I listen, so I have iTunes open and use Screens on my iPad to mirror my desktop so I can work from the couch without a mouse or keyboard.

My music library is much larger and more varied .it's over 365 days and I've only just started on ripping classical. It didn't work for me to put everything in the same iTunes library. It was just too slow and some stuff I wanted to shuffle by album and others by song. So I created multiple libraries by genre and then tossed together a shuffle library of nothing but the best which streams though out the house 24/7.

I wish I had a similar thing for DVDs. I'd love to be able to shuffle movies and tv shows to create my own tv channel that streams to all the rooms in the house.

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davidmahler said:

Both!  usually the apple remote though.....the new one is aluminum and looks nicer than the old.
 
Thanks for the compliment too

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Is the display on the iTouch/iPad as detailed as what you see on Front Row and any special apps used?

I've never used the iPad and I assume it just let's you hold iTunes in your hand as is, but it differs slightly in the nature of alphabetization from Front Row.  Whereas in FR, folders and individual playlists are mixed together alphabetically, in iTunes the folders are always put first, so for instance if I have a folder for Revolver (because of mono and stereo versions) but only a playlist for Abbey Road.....in iTunes Revolver will show up first because it is a folder instead of just a playlist.  I don't use it as often.
 
What I did find is there's a program called Plex which works natively with iTunes (on a Mac) and although not graphically as compelling as Front Row, it is still being upgraded constantly and it never has any severe bugs.  There are some times where FR can be slow in response and some rare occassions where it skips, so I opt for Plex.  The only thing I have against Plex is that 1, so far the playlists don't display coverart (which really is a shame), but also the coverart which is show is of a lower quality and more awkward contrast than that of FR.  FR isn't THAT buggy, and with two small revisions it will always be my first choice, but Plex gets updated constantly.  I've already wrote the Plex team of this request for playlist coverart display and it should be in their next release version.  The coverart still shows when browsing and listening to tracks, just not playlists.  There's also an Apple remote app available on both ipod touch and iPad.  This basically takes you directly into your playlists and folders regarding this system but still runs into the obstacle of Folder before Playlist preference of alphabetizing.
 
Hope this helps

I don't use playlists and folders. I tag genres, performers, album titles and song titles and sort by whatever way I want. I often do searches of various singers' version of the same song, or compare alternate takes from different sources, so I need the searches to go beyond the album/artist concept. Screens basically puts the monitor of my computer on my iPad, so I can do anything on the iPad I can do on the computer. The Apple remote is fine for just playing back, but it doesn't allow you to tag, and I'm constantly doing that as I listen.

I tried plex but my libraries are just too big and obscure, especially my video libraries. It misidentified stuff all over the place and it wasnt easy to fix. Plus it kept grinding along through all my hard drives updating its database. I finally gave up on it.

It would be nice to have pretty screens, but with 12 1.5 TB hard drives packed with stufff, it just isn't practical. A text based database structure works best for me.

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rhythmdevils said:

How do you have time for all this organization?  Pictures of all your purchases, thousands on CD's purchased, with pictures, scanned covers, and meticulously archived with every bit of info.  And only 27?  I want to see what you've got done when you're 60!  You should get a job in Genetics cataloging DNA sequences or something.

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+ and keep a job that is well paid enough to afford the massive hi-fi and music collection.
+ browse head-fi <--- this one is really mind-boggling!
 
You must be super duper effective in everything you do in your daily life to have time for all this. I start to wonder where all MY time goes
 
Hats of to your fine collection

 
Your tagging-fu is superior, DavidMahler. I bow to you.
 
I've long been trying to tell people that for as much as iTunes annoys me, it has some powerful means for managing metadata at larger scales than is immediately obvious. The main obstacles are the lack of good documentation (Apple's bad), unreliable data in the centralized repositories (GraceNote is bad, MusicBrainz is worse) and the need to enter and maintain the data with more than casual rigor. And, well, the relatively arbitrary structure of ID3 tagging (used in MP3) and its workalikes in other audio file formats is an issue too.
 
I'm now wrapping up the ripping of around 1,600 CDs, which has taken about half a year of part-time work, and am now manually proofreading, fixing album art, ripping stragglers, and so on. I plan on keeping the CDs, though - they're highly reliable data backups, and they have all the booklets.
 
PS: Check your pm.

I find that Gracenote is much better than it used to be. It's batting average is almost perfect for me, except with brand new or obscure CDs that aren't in the database yet. I just tag those myself and submit them. Relatively rare though.