Anyone hire a professional organizer to organize your music collection?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by dolstein, Dec 10, 2019.

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  1. fishcane

    fishcane Dirt Farmer

    Location:
    Finger Lakes,NY
    No one on this planet would understand my filing system
     
  2. Runicen

    Runicen Forum Resident

    This is kind of hard to answer without knowing more about even a hypothetical "best case scenario" for what you want to do with this stuff. I'll say up front, I have no idea if there are people who actually offer these kinds of services for music. Sadly, music collections almost require a specialized sort of understanding of what to look for and I doubt your average organizer/appraiser is equipped for that, but I could be wrong.

    I've worked in a library and tend to apply that attitude towards organizing my own collection. It can be a lot of fun, but it can also be maddening when I'm not entirely sure how I want to integrate something into my library.

    Case in point: I used to play fast and loose with genre tags in my digital library. Half of my artists had unique genre identifiers - not out of any sort of pedantic need to sub-divide things, but because I amused myself coming up with weird descriptors for some bands' music. It didn't take me long to realize that it essentially rendered even bothering with the field useless, so I cropped that down to maybe a half dozen or so genre tags so I could at least enjoy the benefits of loose association for shuffle and the like.

    Likewise, now that my listening has diversified into classical, all of the tagging and organization techniques that worked beautifully for pop and rock suddenly aren't quite sufficient. Do I use the composer as the artist? The conductor? Star soloist? Hell... I suspect I'll end up ripping and re-ripping a few times as I start honing in on a tagging method that works and makes dialing this stuff in easier and more user friendly for my purposes.

    So, all this is to say that "organizing" a collection can be a constant work in progress based on what you need the organization for. If you just need format, artist, album, and pressing info - that's just time consuming and maybe a bit tedious. Biggest pain there would be finding someone who could roll with something connected to the 'net in order to positively ID certain pressings (mainly for vinyl, CD is easier at a glance in my experience). However, if you have "down the road" plans for this stuff, that may influence the type of organization you need and how you'd need the information recorded.

    Part of me wants to volunteer to help with this. Sounds like it could be a trip. :laugh:
     
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  3. That explains it, I looked everywhere and tried various ways to watch. Guess I’ll have to hope it comes out on a DVD. I really want to see this!
     
  4. crlong

    crlong Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    This thread has been interesting to me because I’ve actually been looking for someone to help me organize/slim down my overgrown collection. If anyone happens to be interested in a project like this and lives in middle TN, let me know.
     
  5. jimac51

    jimac51 A mythical beast.

    Location:
    Allentown,pa.
    Subject currently a film with lots of Oscar buzz-Al Pacino plays a big part.
     
  6. ShockControl

    ShockControl Bon Vivant and Raconteur!

    Location:
    Lotus Land
    Whatever you do, go with a reputable local music organizing service and not one of the large national chains. I made the mistake of hiring Acme Music Organizing, assuming that their national presence meant quality. Instead, I found their genre filing methodology to be rigid, and I couldn't find many of my favorite albums after they were finished. And I think they scratched my promo copy of "I'll Supply the Love" by Toto. I paid them hundreds of dollars, and then I had to hire a local music organizer to fix all of their mistakes. Do your research.
     
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  7. Holerbot6000

    Holerbot6000 Forum Resident

    Location:
    California
    Is there really such a thing? I guess if you had a HUUUUGE collection, that might be the way to go, or if you are some kind of archivist or something. Part of the joy of collecting anything is indulging the mechanics of maintaining, inventorying, listing, etc. It reminds you what you have, can cause you to have little epiphanies and make connections between disparate elements and, most importantly for me, creates a kind of Zen Garden vibe where you can put the concerns of the day on the back burner to let your subconscious chew away at them while your frontal lobe agonizes over whether to file your Los Super Seven albums under L or S.
     
    Runicen likes this.
  8. gkella

    gkella Glen Kellaway From The Basement

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    I am retired.
    That is all I’ve got to do!!!!
     
  9. patient_ot

    patient_ot Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    Without shelving I wouldn't agree to do the job either.
     
  10. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    She said she (and most of her colleagues who performed the same job) know better than to deal with collectors and hoarders. In addition to inadequate resources, the problem with collector/hoarders is that they have a very specific idea of what they want that can't be explained in a rational way. And often people are calling an organizer because someone else forced the issue and the collector/hoarder is hostile to the organizer before one item has been moved.

    [To be clear, I don't consider the OP's problem to be "hoarding."]
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2019
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  11. Beatnik_Daddyo'73

    Beatnik_Daddyo'73 Music Addiction Personified

    ...I’ll send you my resume. :righton:
     
  12. TJtennispro

    TJtennispro Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atlanta
    I’m in the 615. I’m not looking for a job but I’ve got an opening a page back.
     
  13. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    Hah - turns out my next "project partner" lives right here in town (well, as soon as the lottery check clears...:laugh: )

    This post pushed a couple of buttons with me, and yes I know we've already talked about stuff like this privately. But I've worked with the MusicMaster people, who produce the primary music-scheduling software suite that schedules playlists for over half the radio stations in the world. I like to think I was finally able to talk them into considering developing a stripped-down "hobbyist" version of their software at a price that brings it down into "roon" territory. Mostly for low-requirement radio applications, but we are talking playlists and library management here, so, there's something for us to learn from this.

    I'd really like to see them branch-into this sort of NAS-collector-geek version of that database hierarchy; for now it services radio stations, and that's more of a track-by-track workflow than an album environment. But, these guys are whizzes at what they do, and I've seen them roll-out updates filled with the tiniest little improvements specific to a wide variation of needs their clients request. One of the most powerful attributes to this system is, your customization of sound codes, and how you can use them in playlists to separate ballads, or allow only two or three of one style of music to be allowed to play before it goes looking for another "sound code" to stretch the variety (in my case, I could use it to keep "trip hop" and "trance" apart, or allowable, while only adding as much "soul" as needed, or other complex scheduling). Talk about your "loose association shuffling"!

    I've attended a few "Genius Day" training seminars, one of which was for Classical Radio programmers, and features a German station music director who tweaked the software to include specific enhancements for that radio format. This is tremendously geeky stuff, that probably won't apply to your current application, but it may give you some ideas nevertheless. See how the pros do it (this is just Part 3 of the whole afternoon session):
     
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  14. FrixFrixFrix

    FrixFrixFrix Senior Member

    Location:
    Parts Unknown
    TIL a lot of people don't know that professional archivists exist
     
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  15. Runicen

    Runicen Forum Resident

    Haha. I feel like I should just print up signs that read "Will catalog for CDs" or something like that. :laugh:

    In dealing with Plex and their software, it never ceases to amaze how close these companies can get to the mark while missing them entirely. A feature I think they removed entirely was called "Plex Mix," where you could pick a given artist and create a playlist in a manner similar to Spotify to shuffle "similar" music. How to say this politely... Yeah, it was mostly crap. :biglaugh:

    I mean, it was an interesting idea and, for some artists, it worked reasonably well. For others... Well, some artists only ended up on playlists with their own material even though contemporaries in genre and timeframe were present in my library. In other cases... Well, the hard rock band, Ghost, ended up shuffled with Robyn Hitchcock for some weird reason. I never figured out how that association worked.

    So much of this is beyond "machine learning" or whatever basic methodology seems to feed into this sort of thing. Radio is its own animal in a lot of ways because there are advertisers to consider as well as listeners (if we're talking mainstream here), so that has an entirely different ecosystem to consider. In terms of personal listening, I almost feel like the answer is a sort of "crowd-sourcing" where, similar to CD ripping programs, users can submit meta-data to create "connections" between albums and artists and whoever is actually sitting at the computer can choose to accept or reject that data. I have no idea how one would make this an economically viable thing to develop and host, but it really would be the best of all possible worlds. It would also allow people to fine-tune their organization to taste.

    I mean, people here talk about separating their collections by genre and that just makes my eye twitch to consider it with mine at its present size. :faint: On the other hand, for someone else, it may be required for their organizational peace of mind.

    Coming from working in an actual library (where I cut my teeth on a lot of this stuff before my own collection became a library in its own right), it's amazing how essential it is to avoid a "one size fits all" approach. In some ways, I really don't envy the OP for his plight. I can easily foresee paying someone to do the organization and cataloging at a distance only to find that what made sense to them is not what you had in mind, necessitating either hoping they're good enough to fix the work without charging much more OR being stuck with an imperfect system.
     
  16. Greenalishi

    Greenalishi Birds Aren’t Real

    Location:
    San Francisco

    I've been doing this for a while now. Culling stuff, moving stuff and organizing. Very satisfying. Went through everything. Even the few classical and the comps. Problem is i fill in holes and get new stuff so it kind of goes on and on. But, i feel satisfied that it's pretty organized. Gonna pull out all my cds and lps and try a little more fine and detailed alphabetizing. Maybe after i clean the carpet. ;)
     
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  17. Music Geek

    Music Geek Confusion will be my epitaph

    Location:
    Italy
    What's the purpose of a collection in boxes in storage made of items you don't remember?
     
  18. Kevin j

    Kevin j The 5th 99

    Location:
    Seattle Area
    if it's in storage and you need someone to go through it for you, do you really need it?

    anyway, your collection isn't even that big. suck it up and do it yourself.
     
  19. Kevin j

    Kevin j The 5th 99

    Location:
    Seattle Area
    and, assuming this is stored in a storage facility, he's paying to not listen to music. strange.
     
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  20. ShockControl

    ShockControl Bon Vivant and Raconteur!

    Location:
    Lotus Land
    Required for me, not for peace of mind, but to be able to find things quickly. If a run-of-the-mill jazz album contains one kick-ass Latin track, I file it in the Latin section, or else I would never be able to find it again.
     
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  21. NunoBento

    NunoBento Rock 'n' Roll Star

    Location:
    London
    Your ex was going after your records?! My God, that's a new kind of low.
     
    Panama Hotel likes this.
  22. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

     
  23. douglas mcclenaghan

    douglas mcclenaghan Forum Resident

    It would make a superb thread!
     
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  24. WithinYourReach

    WithinYourReach Resident Millennial

    Location:
    Austin, TX
    For me, everything has to filed a certain way. Oldest to newest, solo artists, box sets, compilations, soundtracks, etc... It wouldn't be worth anyone's time or worth the hassle of your collection being filed 99% of the time not to your satisfaction.
     
  25. jeroemba

    jeroemba Forum Resident

    Location:
    France
    Dylan bootlegs, aisle 86 F, here we are.
    [​IMG]
     
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