How do you maintain and organize your sound library? (Literature/articles/videos, not SFX)

Question

With such a wealth of information (videos, articles, forum threads, etc) out there in cyberland, anyone have a neat way to save/archive/organize/bookmark useful articles and info for future recollection?

Obviously with OSX it's easy to "print" and save .pdfs, and there are a number of utilities out there to save videos from YouTube, Vimeo, etc. And then just organize into hierarchical folders.

I use Delicious for online bookmarks but that starts getting unwieldy even with somewhat thorough tagging, and sometimes links disappear. Have also mildly dabbled with Zotero (which is more academic-based) as well. Just curious if anyone has anything they'd like to share with the class. Data management is pretty key with so much stuff out there in the ether.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm sooo behind the ball on cloud-based bookmark sync, so this is a great topic for me to follow.

As a user of iOS devices, I've fallen totally in love with Instapaper: Whack any webpage with a bookmarklet/applet, and you can sync your devices with the Instapaper service, and it renders the page without navs or ads, and it really winds up looking like an eReader kind of reading experience. Really smart, and how I digest 90% of Designing Sound's articles, which I usually don't have time to read at work! :-)

I also have a whole "AudioDocs" folder on my boot drive, which is subdivided into "Technique," "GearDocumentation," "TechPapers," and so forth, which is where I put PDFs and images/diagrams, even if I have hard-copy manuals. I then use Good Reader on the iPad to keep all this on the iPad, so I can pull up any manual I need without needing to switch back and forth between a software app and Acrobat.

I also have a folder of reference movies; these are digital copies of videos that I own, or short clips that I either want to study for excellent sound or re-dub for practice. This also gets synced with my iPad or iPhone for the occasional bus or subway ride.

Answer 2

I use Evernote a lot for that, saving content with tags, different notebooks, categories etc. I put there all the relevant stuff I found in the web, and also my own notes, references, etc.. It's amazing for this kind of tasks!

You can setup clippers in the computer or in the browser, create custom shortcuts, save the original URL of the document being saved, and also attach files to the notes. It's fast, easy to use and free!

I have several notebooks for sound design stuff, for example:

• Sound design interviews
• Sound design articles
• Field recording articles
• Sound design notes
• Mixing guides

Plus, you can access the material from Desktop (Win/Mac) and also on an Internet Broswer or even your mobile device. You have several view options, filters, etc. And the search engine is fantastic and very fast... it can even search for text inside images.

Take a look: http://evernote.com

Answer 3

I use evernote alot for this purpose as well. Nice thing about it too, is that as you read, you can also make notes about the important points right there in the same program.

I have also starting using the "reader" button in safari to clean up articles to the essentials and save them as a PDF. It turns out that without any other formating, PDFs made through this method look great on a kindle in Landscape mode. I have done tons of my reading over the last month that way.

Especially articles from Designing Sound ;) Miguel