Getting a music library started

We've been focusing on storage hardware for your music library and now it's time to start thinking about the actual library itself. This is an important step if you're starting from scratch - perhaps even more important to make sure you're happy with your organization if you're already in the thick of it. To review our progress so far, you've made the decision of how you're going to store your library. The choices are a NAS or a desktop computer with either attached or internal storage or both. My vote has always been the latter, focusing on using the cheap and cheerful USB 3.0 hard drives that you can find on "any street corner" of the web. With your decision in mind the next issues we need to think about are ripping and then organizing - because without ripping from CD's to hard drive you have nothing to organize. But wait! When you rip your media you are committing to an organizational scheme because ripping is where we get our metadata that is the basis of identifying the tracks and albums in our library. So I'd like to get started somewhat out of sequence if I may. Let's first decide how we plan on organizing our library and then second, we'll take a look at the various options for ripping our music. I want to leave today by assigning you some homework. Yeah I know, when you signed up for these daily posts you thought I was going to do all the work - but no! Now I am asking something from you. OK, well, you don't actually have to, but I recommend that if this is a subject you're interested in that you do a bit of reading first. I would start here:http://brianabbott.net/projects/how-i-organize-classical-music-in-itunes and then download this: http://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-ebook.html Between these two documents we can start to see some of the issues and prep we should be thinking about.