I’m in the process of backing up my entire CD collection as well as organizing all the media on my server at home. I use simple directory structures and a homebrew database driven catalog program to manage my collections. For example, I have a directory called “Broadway” where I keep all my (on and off) Broadway related media, with each album in its own folder, such as:

Broadway/(Les Miserables) London Cast/03. One Day More.ape

Pretty simple and straightforward. However, unnerving complications arise when I get to my classical albums, which more often than not feature works from multiple composers and sometimes performances from multiple artists. How does one go about arranging these in a simple directory structure? I am NOT going to create path names like:

Classical/(Saint-Saens, Tchaikovsky, Faure, Bruch) [Han-na Chang, Rostropovich, LSO] - Cello Concerto No.1, Variations on a Rocco Theme, Elegie op.24, Kol Nidrei op.47/10. Cello Concerto No.1 [I. Allegro non troppo].ape

Talk about ridiculous!

At one point in time I tried sorting solely based on composer, requiring me to dissect apart most of my CD albums. This provided a nice, consistent naming scheme, along the lines of

Classical/Sibelius/(Midori) - Violin Concerto Op.47 [I. Allegro].ape

and the like. However, as time went on, having tracks that used to be in the same CD location now in different folder locations became too confusing. Plus it was messy dealing with identical pieces performed by the same artist in different venues. So I eventually scrapped that idea.

There is the option of ditching the dependence on directory names altogether and relying solely on my database application to arrange, sort, and find albums and tracks, but that creates a layer of abstraction that basically leaves me totally dependent on the application, an idea with which I am not comfortable.

So, here I am trying to figure out a decent way to organize my classical music files, but with very little progress. Anyone out there who has faced this problem before care to share their solutions?

While driving home last night I was thinking about domain names and WAP. When/if web browsing on mobile phones becomes widely popular, one of the more cumbersome aspects of it will be keying in domain names on the number pad. Of course, if your domain name is made up of only those letters that appear first in each three- or four-letter set associated with each number, it’ll be easy for users to get to your site. If not, then it’ll be more of a pain and, in effect, a deterrent. Then, a lightbulb went on. What if you registered the domain name corresponding to the first letter of each three- or four-letter set used in your domain name? That way, it’ll save the user a few key presses and possibly drive more traffic to your site! Now, I’m not talking about qiguang.net, but huge, well established, multi-billion dollar sites, like google.com! I could register their mobilized domain name, then sell it to them for big bucks when they realize how useful it is!

Equiped with this new money-making idea, I head off ot register gngjd.com (”n” = “o” pressed twice in succession), only to realize that Google already owns gngjd.com! Argh! If only I had thought about this earlier– before 2000, in fact, since that’s when Google picked it up. Those crafty people. And forget it– yahoo, msn, weather, even microsoft (mgapmpmdt.com) are already taken. So then I thought, forget mobilized domain names. Just use the numbers themselves. Well, you wouldn’t expect anything less… check it out: 466453.com.

The first string says,
“Hello, I’d like a rum and cokerhe7954454gh2kjn.,.43>>[][]21?24″
The second string says,
“You’ll have to excuse my friend, he’s not null-terminated.”

Har-har!