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Like most of the connected world you’ll probably keep the vast majority of your music collection in digital format. Even if some of us mourn the day when you’d wait months for that new album and listen to it for weeks, digesting every lyric and change in rhythm, now keeping up to date with the cutting edge in any one genre is a almost a full time job. The upside is more access, if occasionally an overload, and more, much more, to discover. To help you surfers out here are a few tricks, hints and guidelines you should be aware of to maintain a crisp collection.

Basics

Keep your music organised with full track info, including artist, album, and genres. Genres or music types are great for managing large collections and getting to stuff quickly, also very handy if your collection exceeds your MP3 player, so you can more swiftly manage what you upload.

MusicBrainz is a great metadatabase (6.7 million tracks and counting) for helping you auto tag your tracks with the relevant info if you’ve got gaps. You can also try Tunatic which works song by song, and if you’re away from your computer use Shazam (the awesome mobile phone based music tagger, just dial 2580, 50p per correct tag in the UK). Wikipedia and Discogs also have relatively complete music databases if you want to look stuff up manually. All three will link through to related artists and styles to help you on your music discovering paths.

Bear in mind though that digitised music reduces the quality of what you are hearing, 192 kbps and above is good quality, but the better the quality the bigger the file. Full CD quality is around 50MB a track, depending on length obviously, going to a 192 kbps will reduce the file to 5MB. True audiophiles won’t want to lose that high fidelity sound, but most of us don’t mind / can’t hear the difference.

File Editing

Sometimes you want to split and/or combine tracks. This can be done manually or with the use of a cue sheet (see below for the format, just save as .cue file extension from a .txt document and voila). There are a variety of shareware programs available with free trial periods online that can help you do this and the process is intuitive and simple, albeit time consuming.

Streaming Audio

Ever heard a great tune on a website or internet radio station that you wanted to record but couldn’t? Or even have a record of a VOIP conversation over Skype? There are also simple to use programs to “grab” this audio stream. Try the Freecorder Toolbar. You could even use this to record music from old cassettes, just connect your tape deck to computer with an RCA cable from the deck to the line in connector on the sound card.

Last note

Audacity is one of the best programs around for doing most of the above, it’s on sourceforge – a great open source initiative that you should definitely bookmark. And finally for tracking your favourite artists across the blogoshpere you have to check out hypem.