Building The Keep
I had some music digitally in a collection, but in order to fulfill my quest for a radio station, I needed more music – lots more. I am primarily a classic rock listener, however in recent years have begun to discover amazing progressive rock, jazz, funk, country and other genres of music I’ve acquired mainly due to the requests I receive from my listeners.
In the beginning, I researched top 100 classic rock charts. One such list is the Klassics List from The St. Louis Classic Rock Preservation Society. 65 pages of songs, and artists and their rankings. A great resource for anyone who’s looking to expand their digital music library in the genre of classic rock.
I call my music library The Keep, a term of endearment based on Piers Anthony’s novels I used to read as young man, fantasy novels about magic, dragons and mystical worlds.
There’s many ways to “acquire” your music. The first and most time consuming is using your CD ROM drive to rip your own CD’s to digital format. I own about 200 CD’s and spent a great deal of time going through them, deciding which ones to rip and which ones to donate to Goodwill because I doubt I’ll ever listen to them. That was a mistake, I feel because today I get requests and remember I used to have that CD but didn’t rip it, so I’d have to go an alternate route to “acquire” it.
Because I’m a linux (Ubuntu) user, I use the native stuff that is available for my OS. I use sound-juicer to rip my CD’s. The nice part about this software, is it can auto populate the metadata for your audio files so you don’t have to spend time typing in the information yourself. It is easy to use and I recommend ripping your CD’s to FLAC format for the best sound quality. When I first started building The Keep, I was unaware of this, and ripped to MP3 format. Alas, I am still replacing my MP3 files with FLAC files to make it right – the difference is definitely noticeable to the listener.
Torrents
While it’s not the “safest” way to get your library beefed up, I have found it to be a necessary evil. There’s danger associated with all things on the internet and I won’t waste time listing them but just be a careful person with what you get from torrents and you’ll be fine.
We-Get
I found that using websites to search for torrent files was the number one offender and many of them deliver viruses, and is the preferred place of hackers looking to get their mitts on your system. DO NOT USE WEBSITES TO SEARCH FOR TORRENTS!
Instead, Ubuntu users have a slick little tool that is command line driven called “we-get”. While it’s a basic tool, it gives me the magnet links I need to load the torrent into my client Transmission for “acquring” new music.
Torrench
Here’s another excellent command-line torrent search tool – Torrench. They all do the same thing, safely find torrents and allow you to download them with ease.
I spend hours a week searching and downloading torrent collections to build the Keep. It is a practice that continues today to obtain music and expand Hawkwynd Radio’s breadth of variety.
However you choose to get your digital library is up to you, but one tip that really made a difference for me was to be sure the quality is good. FLAC format is best. MP3 is ok, but I wanted good sound and quality music. If you have the opportunity to get some MFSL recordings in FLAC format, do it.
Talk with friends, and ask them to loan you their CD collection or invite them over for a ripping party. You can trade music too. Either way you do it, the goal is to collect as much music as you can.
Of course, genre is your choice, and that’s the beauty of having your own internet radio station. You play what you want, not what someone tells you to play.