If there was ever any doubt in my mind about my lack of time management skills and general insanity, it's gone now. Because, now that the massive archiving project is over and all my CDs are nicely organized and labeled in their binders, I've decided that I simply must start another humongous music-related project. This time it's a database of all songs in the Divaville Lounge collection.
It sound nuts, but there's a good reason for it. Christa showed me to use allmusic.com to search for music info. Which is necessary more often than you might think. Supposing someone calls in requesting Jeri Southern. I don't have any albums of hers, but I might have a song or two on compilations. Or they want the song, say, "Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider," but they don't know who sings it. Again, I might have it, but if I haven't played it before, I probably don't know where.
During the hustle and bustle of a show, there is simply no way I could find these songs just by flipping through the binders. Especially if I don't know for sure if I even had them or not. So allmusic.com becomes an invaluable resource. I can search for an artist or song, and see if they turn up on any albums I have. Christa used it even when she knew she had the song, to quickly find the album it was on. If you have over 20 albums by one artist, this can save you a lot of time!
The only problem is, allmusic.com hasn't been working for me. It's been timing out every single time I try to use it. In the past 3 weeks I've tried many times, during the show or not, on different computers and different browsers. Not one successul search. Christa warned me that the site was flaky, but this is ridiculous.
After 3 weeks of this I'm ready to write off allmusic.com. And I've realized that what I really need is a searchable online database of my own music collection. The massive indexing project! Luckily, due to the massive archiving project, at least half the collection is still on either my computer or Georg's. (We didn't want to delete the files in case one of the CDRs went bad.) A thousand thanks to Lisa and D. for pointing out last night that iTunes generates an XML file of its library. Thus sparing me from having to import the data from all those hundreds of albums, one at a time.
It was easy as pie to import the iTunes libraries into Filemaker. Unfortunately Filemaker's "web publishing" feature leaves much to be desired. If I had a permanent IP address for my computer, I could link directly to the database through a web interface. But, I don't. If I had the more expensive "server" version of Filemaker I could export the DB to a searchable web page. But, I don't.
What I'm left with is exporting the DB to one big long humongous web page, comprising a big long humongous table which displays every record. Not exactly what I wanted. So the next step will be to export the Filemaker database to MySQL, and then write PHP pages to display the song info exactly the way I want.
It won't be ready by today's show, since I don't feel like rushing to get it done this morning. And then there are still all the albums that weren't in our iTunes, which will indeed have to be added manually, one at a time. Still, I feel better just knowing that I have a plan. In the meantime I can search Christa's and my old playlists if I need song info. It's not perfect because it only includes songs that have been played on prior shows, but it's a pretty good stopgap.
"What I'm left with is exporting the DB to one big long humongous web page, comprising a big long humongous table which displays every record. Not exactly what I wanted."
Don't overlook the benefits of a flat file! The "find" feature in a text editor (or Firefox) is always going to be faster than even the fastest database search. Sure, it's more time-consuming to do multi-value searches ("Ida" AND NOT "sinatra"), but for quick lookups, it's great.
wow, that's awesome that importing the xml was so easy!!
if it were manageable to bring your laptop up to the station every week (and having done that, i can understand why you wouldn't want to), that could open up some possibilities, like running filemaker locally on your laptop, or keeping the massive html file local on your laptop...
oh, hey wait. could you burn the massive html file to a cd, and copy it to the station's mac... then use a web browser find feature to search it quickly? if it's local to the hard drive, it would probably be pretty fast. the question is, does the station's computer have a cd drive that's accessible. i'm thinking yes.
the other thing is that you might want to print it periodically, like once a month or so, to have as a backup if the station's computer is unavailable for some reason.
These are great ideas, thank you both!
Kevin: I totally forgot that you can search a web page! That might work great. I could make two html pages: one sorted by title and one by artist. That way, whichever kind of search I need to do, the info will be grouped the way I need it. I'll try it and see if it will do the trick, before going to the effort of coding up an online db.
clovepod: The xml import was beyond easy. All I had to do was download an .xsl style sheet, which I found by googling "import itunes library to filemaker."
I have taken my laptop to the station, for the purpose of backing up music that I use a lot which might go missing.* It definitely adds to the stress to have yet another thing to deal with, and the hassle of getting everything out of the car and up the stairs. And it's only an option on alternate weeks, because when Ross has a band in, his equipment fills the whole table in the mcr. I make room for the music binders on top of the turntables, but there wouldn't be space for a laptop too.
*you might not think divaville lounge music would be a theft risk, but I was heartbroken when Sarah Vaughan's Perdido: Live! disappeared last year. It might have just been misfiled, but the loss is the same. And it's out of print, priced higher than I'm willing to pay. Wahh!