Years ago, when I had only a few hundred albums  (counting all of my vinyl, cassettes and CD's), I had no trouble remembering the good and bad tracks on any given album.  Now, with about 2,000 CD's and 1,000 LP's, there's just no way to remember unless it's some album I grew up with or have heard dozens of times.  I finally started putting a Post-It note on each album as I listened to it, grading each song, and this has helped me to find favorite tracks and avoid despised cuts.  Most of my prog albums are burned into my memory, so they're not a problem.  However, let's say you have some album of World Music, and all the song titles look like gibberish.  How you gonna find your favorite track? 

 

 

       So, my question to those of you with similarly large collections, is this: do you just listen to the whole album no matter what, do you have some system like mine, or do you have an unusually good memory? 

 

 

 

                                                                

 

 

Of course with CDs and their small paper booklets, this was impossible so I did the same with a small pencil >> still barely noticeable.

 

Of couse with my Cd-Rs I have no such problems since I onlytake the ones I like. Neither did I with cassettes.

 

 

So I check out the CD track list and program according to what I like. Of course I can always push the skip >>! button if I hate it too much.

 

In compiling a 3 hour radio show each week (purely on a part-timer basis), trying have a balance of the new and the old at approx 60:40, then 30 weeks a year, I tend to do a lot of sampling 1 to 2 minutes of tracks from a lot of albums. But I because I normally walk into work, a discman is my essential travel companion - and so 45 minute per day  plus maybe 20 minutes at a handful of lunch breaks allows a lot more of an album to be heard. On occasion when I have to do a long car journey on business, then 6 complete albums can get heard - although the poorer ones will be patiently heard for 4 tracks, and the rest of the tracks sampled for about a minute to hear if things get any better but then removed for something more pleasurable.

 

The dj ethos prevails in me, since  I tend to play favourite tracks rather than whole well-known album for pleasure. And because of this  I love putting sample CDs together, because there are very few fully satisfactory albums I want to hear right the way through. The compilations started with a 4 CD set of my favourite jazz rock tracks when I first got a CD burner on my PC (BTW I've now got the 4 down to one CD, and written up for the Abstract Logix website). However, since I've done compilation of prog tracks but by less obvious bands (partly to educate a 17 year old fan of the show who had suddenly discovered prog about 6 years ago), a two CD set of the evolution of brass rock, favourite Indo-jazz fusion, favourite nu.fusion, evolution of prog from garage and psychedelia (1964 - 1971), the best of the Johansson brother, the Jonas Hellborg, Kevin Gilbert, British blues boom tracks, favorite tracks from vinyl (which either not been released on CD or if released on CD, not bought having only the one track worth worrying about).

 

Currently sampling great riffs (known and unknown) from albums to be made up for some radio jingles. One of the station's jingle-making whizs took my samples of Terry Riley, Krimson, Kansas, Gary Lucas, Chicago, Edgar Brougton Band, Mahvishnu Orchestra, Lifetime, Procupine Tree, Holdsworth, Zappa etc, and produced three excellent 40 second programme IDs for me - check out the ALT2 for these when it comes back on the air.

 

I used to do that until about half a year ago. It worked fairly well with an auto filter but it was quite a bit of work to keep it organized. Now I use Windows Media Player 11 and I've had no problems (worth mentioning). It does an excellent of organizing your music files in whatever way you select. It can rip the files from a CD at any of the common bit rates. There's no pause between tracks. Of course you may run in to difficulties if you need to organize vinyls and casettes and if you don't run Windows you can't use Windows Media Player.

     So, most of you went the high-tech route....   I should've mentioned that I don't even own a computer.   I use the ones at work and in the recording studio, but not for burning CD's of my record collection.

 

Rip musical entities of several tracks as a single mp3 file.

 

I've heard there are some MP3 players where you can adjust the gap between tracks to zero ...  I don't know which ones though.

The cassettes (damn 80's!) I've mostly ripped too, but of course they don't sound quite as good.

 

All the CDs are ripped so I can play them from any PC in the house and also pull out individual tracks for compilation CD-Rs.

 

As far as listening, I have a pretty good memory, but for music that I know really well I'm not inclined to play the entire album every time I want to listen to it, unless it's a concept album in which case it really is one contiguous piece of music and should be listened to as such.