Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: 9 Below Zero - Treat Her Right (Pandora)

Very little is as annoying as losing a hard drive on a file server. It’s particularly galling when that disk contains a rather disturbingly massive music collection that you run a pirate radio station off of and all the archives of the podcast you occasionally assemble plus all your sound FX for your live show …

Yes, I’m marginally annoyed. I probably deserve to be, at myself, given how long that drive’s been going bad for, but what can you do? When you’re talking about that much raw data, backups on a home system are awkward at best and impossible at worst. All I can do is reassemble the things I can and work around what I can’t, which is interesting, because I actually don’t feel all that bad over it.

The podcast bits are annoying, but the bulk of them are up on Archive, which means they’ll probably outlive everything but the heat-death of the universe. I don’t and shouldn’t feel too bad about that. I’ve learned so much since doing the earliest ones and refined my hardware so much since then that it’s an entirely different show these days, anyway.

The sound FX are an annoyance, but there’s no reason to have a big library of sound FX on tap anymore with sites like Soundsnap out there that can toss me something I need when I need it. Fourty different kinds of “explosion” FX and my heart’s content for various things … Do I really need more?

The true Pain in the Ass(tm)(c) were my music piles — but here’s where the kicker starts: I have lots of CDs. As spasticferret can attest, I have several multi-hundred binders full of music. Plus, as I realized today, I own so much music from eMusic that I probably have a larger playlist just from eMusic than most radio stations have in their entire library. Never was that more clear to me than just a bit ago when I was telling the eMusic client to send me all the tracks I’d bought — one album at a time. Needless to say, it was tedious, exacting, annoying work, but I suppose it’ll pay off in short order. (It reminded me that I really need to listen to The Staggers’ “One Heartbeat Away From Hell” again since it is very likely my favourite album of all time No, really, it’s that good.)

This is also a good time to reconsider my storage allocation methods. Traditionally, I’ve been sorting things into a directory based on the ARTIST/ALBUM hierarchy, but does it really matter? I’m almost tempted to start a wholly different hierarchy: just DATE_OF_ADDITION. It’s not like I don’t add all the individual tracks to a database for the broadcast server anyway and it would surely make it easier to import them as I go, but harder to find any given thing from just the directory hierarchy. Oh, who am I kidding? I’ll keep doing it the traditional way if only because it makes it fast to find things for download from the system for ftp purposes. Le sigh.

Until I get everything put back together, there’s no Redoubt. of course. I’m having to get by with Pandora, if you can imagine it. While it works, it’s not ideal. For one, there’s insufficient rockabilly … even when you make a channel specifically for it.