Discography (was: Re: lyrics)

[Ulrich Grepel <uli@zoodle.robin.de>]

Hi!

Vickie quoted Bryan:
> > As to typing the lyrics, save your fingers, they're on-line in various
> > places. I'm about to set up a home page with an excellent lyric clickable
> > reference, if all goes well, of everything, demos, albums, sorted by
> > title, album, alphabetical, etc. Stay tuned.
>
> Why not join the Gaffaweb project and donate your work there?
> We need someone to do the lyrics, and in a way you propose
> to do them. If you're going to do this, do it for the Gaffaweb.
> Please?

Ok.

Here's one working on something else that seems to fit in: the discography.
Unfortunately,

a) work is going on *VERY* slowly (I'm working on it since 1993),
b) I don't have a scanner
c) usual scanners do not scan 12"x12" sized album covers
d) my computer has a b&w screen
e) I don't have every item in the discography to start taking pictures ;-)
f) so far I do not have Web access (at home). That should change in about 2-3
   weeks.

Nevertheless, I've already started to get the data into html form. Haven't got
far so far, only three albums so far (The Kick Inside, Lionheart and "Kate Bush
Radio Special - Self Portrait - The Kick Inside". But except for HTML > level 2
and pictures it's complete. That is, there is for everything that's already
in there:

- a page for each album/single/tape/whatever including:
  - track list with timing, all track titles are hotlinks to the song pages (see
    below)
  - an entry for every (known) issue of each album (in case of The Kick Inside
    this list holds 49 (!) entries so far). Each entry has a unique ID which
    is done in an extensible way so that it keeps sorted if new entries are
    inserted. In an ideal world this ID could be used for traders ("item x.y.z
    offered").
- a song list (alphabetically sorted)
- a page for each song including:
  - Lyrics
  - list of all (known) versions of the song and for each of these:
    - list of albums/singles/tapes/whatevers that contain that version,
      hotlinked to the corresponding album/... pages

Of course there's room everywhere for

- arbitrary comments on each album/song/particular item/whatever.
- loads and loads of pictures of all the items
- time donated to work on it ;-)

I guess the cheapest way to get the pictures would be a video camera
and a still frame grabber. I have a camera at hand, but no frame grabber.
Normal scanners are no good, at least for items larger than roughly 8.5"x14"
which unfortunately is true for half of the vinyl. Remember that we're
easily talking about more than 1000 pictures here. Hard disk space shouldn't
be a problem at zoodle.robin.de, unless each scan is done at 300 dpi in True
Color...

What I would like to have as pictures are:

vinyl:
- front and back cover, for gatefold things also the inner pages
- labels

CDs:
- front and back of booklet, back of CD cover (inlay)
- label
- if relevant pics are inside the booklet, this would be nice too.

others:
- corresponding stuff. In a word: I do not only want to have the
  front cover. I want pictures of the parts that actually distinguish
  the various issues of a certain album.

I guess ideal picture size would be something about 200x200 pixels.
Or only 100x100, but an additional larger version (400x400 or so) after
clicking on it. All these can still be done with a video camera and a
frame grabber. Problem is: you need good light, a tripod, and something
to fix the items as well. Also, for non-rectangular stuff (like discs...)
or at least for clear stuff (like some vinyl thingies) a good neutral
background.

And of course you need a good colleKTion ;-)


Now why is work going on so slow:

- I don't have much free time
- it is a huge amount of work: the stuff I did so far took me about one or two
  days to bring it into this format, and it's only about 14 KBytes out of the
  500 KBytes of the plain text file of the discography. Remember: This will
  result in about a Megabyte of pure HTML *text* without *any* pictures
  in there. Factor 2 is for all the hotlinks and formatting.

Any volunteers to help me? Anyone an idea of how to do it automatically?
(Sounds quite difficult, given the relatively free-form text file format
I have so far as the discography.)

Bye,

Uli


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