As an outsider trying to grasp the bounds of the archival field at the same time that it is entering a period of unprecedented change, I frequently find myself attracted to discussions about this change. Not only do such discussion clarify for me the boundaries of the field, but they give me insight into where I might be of help in the future. In two recent bulletins of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), society president, Richard Pearce-Moses, initiated one such discussion.

First, a status update on the project. At this point, I have lost track of exactly how many discs I have encoded. This is probably because the ripping environment has been working virtually flawlessly since I finished troubleshooting, but, a rough estimate puts me at around 200-250 discs encoded. Now, to move on to an issue that has been in the back of my mind for a while: genre description.

Last we heard, I was having problems with the Winamp/FLAC combination for ripping CDs. As it turns out, I was not only unsuccessful in figuring out what the exact issues were, let alone resolving them, but it turns out that the ripping process was not being entirely transparent about non-obvious errors. I discovered upon listening to some of the encoded files that there were occasional errors in the form of digital audio glitches, and, in some cases, truncated (prematurely ending) files. The ripping process did not inform me that there were any problems outside of the major errors that I occasionally encountered (and which prompted me to investigate in the first place). Fortunately, these hidden errors were not too frequent.

Frustrated by these persistent problems with Winamp, I began to look for a better solution. Some Googling and freeware searches later, I discovered dbPowerAMP, a free ripper/converter whose makers claimed to have been frustrated about error-prone rippers in much the same way as I. dbPowerAMP meets all of the specifications that I enumerated at the outset of the project, so I decided to give it a try.

Although I am still debugging the CD ripping problems I have been having, I have enough of a music corpus to begin thinking about second stage metadata generation. Additionally, I already have a corpus of 1700+ digital photos that I can also begin thinking about describing.

I made some progress this week on my audio encoding project. In a total of three sessions I have ripped the contents of about 50 CDs to a lossless digital format with basic embedded metadata. This entry recounts the requirements, procedures, and observations on the project thus far.

I've recently embarked on a personal digital archives project involving digital audio. I've recently embarked on a personal digital archives project involving digital audio. This is one of a couple of projects I have in mind to help me explore the intricacies of managing digital objects with an eye on experimenting and understanding the challenges the individuals and small groups face when managing digital objects.

Published in American Archivist, Vol. 68, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2005, pp. 53-73.