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----- Original Message ----- From: "Schooley, John" <[log in to unmask]> .wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/4-ways-one-big-database-would-hel > p-music-fans-industry/ > 4 Ways One Big Database Would Help Music Fans, Industry > > "The solution to this and other problems dogging the music industry > could be forehead-slappingly simple: one big, free, public database > with, at the very least, song titles in one column and unique > identifiers in another. When online and mobile music services build > their own content databases out of the labels' catalogs, they would have > incentives to use the same numbers to identify each song, for the > reasons laid out below. Music services already apply their own unique > identifiers to songs in their catalogs, so the use of numbers is not the > issue - they just need to be the same numbers. <snip> > Interesting...but a VERY large project!! I estimate there were several HUNDRED thousand different recordings issued on 78 rpm discs (my specialty) between 1893 and 1958...and then add in all the MANY current digital recordings to that...?! So, the relevant question then becomes, "How many musical sound recordings have been made available to the public since such were first sold c.1893?" Now, let us assume that this "infinite database" will include, as a field in each data record, at least a PARTIAL copy of the relevant sound recording. Since we are already working with better than one "megarecording" (one million sound recordings)...if we include, say, a 500KB "sample" of each of 1.5 MILLION sound recordings...well, that is 750GB of data! Quite possible, in our current era of 1*T*B drives...but some poor <deleted> is going to have to find all those recordings (I have about 56,000 78's, or about 100,000 of the total...?!)...and then they will have to be "digitized" (since this may have to be done in "real time," we are looking at 5000 hours here...and that is only MY 78's!) That is 625 eight-hour days...or around TWO years worth of effort! Worse yet, there will still be around 1,944,000 recordings I DON'T own which will have to be found?! Or, 5,832,000 MORE minutes of music...?! That is 2430 8-hour days...or about 7 YEARS of steady work! And keep in mind, I'm discussing 500KB PARTS of recordings and NOT the entire tunes...?! And the transfers will presumably have to be done in "real time"...?! Now, I need to find the two years to listen to all my 78's...?! Steven C. Barr