Your a community radio station with a large CD collection. You know you need to ‘go digital’, but your not exactly sure how to get there. You know that just sitting down with iTunes and a big hard drive isn’t going to do you a lot of good. What do you do? This was where KEXP (kexp.org) was two years ago, when I walked through the doors at their old Dexter and Denny studios. At this time, KEXP was in the midst of their first big capital campaign to raise money for a new studio on the Seattle Center campus. Having been a long time supporter, I wasn’t surprised when I received a call from JeeYoung Dobbs asking if I would like to take a studio tour and learn more about the ‘new home’. I eagerly accepted, but also let her know that I had more than money to offer. With my 20 years of experience in music technology, I was interested in seeing if there was anything I could do to help them with their technology needs.
So fast forward two years, and KEXP now has a very well defined CD and content ingestion workflow, and is currently adding several hundred CD’s a week to their digital library. This is largely thanks to the efforts of Dylan Flesch, Media Asset Librarian at KEXP, who I worked with to define the high level processes used to ingest their library, as well as their weekly rotation and reviews. I am now in the middle of setting up a similar, but in ways even more complex system for KBCS (kbcs.fm), and will be using those learnings to help out KSER (kser.org) to digitize their library.
This is the first of a series of posts going into the processes we have created, the software we have developed (both open and closed source), and the things we have learned.
Batch Ripping of CD’s (Coming Soon)
Metadata (Coming Soon)
Using and Playing your Content (Coming Soon)
Resources (Coming Soon)