? for those with 1,000+ albums...

 

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.