Pardon me for taking a little liberty with this topic. First, I discovered today that I am the third person in the club to purchase a Baetis Streamer/Server. I hope we can bring our joint observations to the attention of the club when time allows.
Second - I have started on (for me) an epic journey to load my CD library. This is the first chance I have had to move from CD into a music library so the loading process is a steep learning curve. How many CDs are we talking about? Hum, I wish I knew. At one point I had three thousand and then two friends dropped off their collections (1K each). Finally I've been buying a few large box classical collections. So the answer is an unqualified... "alot."
One of the advantages of purchasing from Baetis is the customer service which the owner offers. I knew that many had said this was first class and invaluable. What I didn't know is that without this help I would not be as far along as I am.
For those who don't know, there are hardware and software solutions which you must carefully put together to affectively input a very large quantity of CDs. Hardware starts with either a single load CD/DVD loader or a multi disc loader from a company called Nimby. Friends who have attempted this amount of loading warned me that unless I wanted to dedicate every weekend to the task for months that I should go the multi loader approach. A wise decision as since about four o'clock today I've loaded over two hundred CDs.
The last piece of the puzzle I needed before data reached my new Baetis machine was access to CD metadata. Remember when this was free? Apparently this has changed. Single disc lookups are still free but attempting to access the library of one company in a continuous process (aka Batch Load) raises a red flag that shuts down your access. There may be a work around but I'm on a timeline that's limiting my decision making so I've paid ten cents per disk for access to this meta data.
More to come on this quest when I get a chance. Wasn't it all so much easier when we opened up the LP cardboard cover, wiped off the dust from the vinyl and then settled in with the large print album credits to enjoy the music and the information on how it was made?