I'm looking for advice on best Digital Asset Management practices for a home
musician with a Powermac, a Powerbook, an external Firewire drive, and a
hybrid Ethernet/wireless network.

I don't know if I need DAM software per se, but if there's something useful
and affordable to a home musician, that's great. Mostly, though, I'm looking
for processes and habits that will ensure that I'll be able to keep track of
what's what, and what the latest version of something is as we bounce from
system to system, usually copying files via hard drive, and not via the
network, though the network can be used to access a shared catalog database if
that's a good idea.

The main focus here is on audio (not images/video), though there's certainly
some video and Web grahpics to track as well - we're currently doing most of
that from an MS Windows machine.

Your thoughts?

On Sat, 17 Dec 2005 00:24:05 -0800, Steve Jorgensen
wrote:

I'm looking for advice on best Digital Asset Management practices for a home
musician with a Powermac, a Powerbook, an external Firewire drive, and a
hybrid Ethernet/wireless network.

I don't know if I need DAM software per se, but if there's something useful
and affordable to a home musician, that's great. Mostly, though, I'm looking
for processes and habits that will ensure that I'll be able to keep track of
what's what, and what the latest version of something is as we bounce from
system to system, usually copying files via hard drive, and not via the
network, though the network can be used to access a shared catalog database if
that's a good idea.

The main focus here is on audio (not images/video), though there's certainly
some video and Web grahpics to track as well - we're currently doing most of
that from an MS Windows machine.

Your thoughts?

Trying to answer my own question, how about this idea...

Since all the music is done on Macs with OS X, there is a Comments attribute
in the Get Info dialog for every file (if Windows had file comments, we could
do this for our graphics stuff too). Taking the example of moving a file from
the laptop to the firewire drive, and then to the Powermac, I could do the
following...

1. Copy the project directory from the laptop to the FW drive
2. Add comment to the laptop copy: "Copied to FW Drive on Dec 17, 2005"
3. Add comment to FW drive copy: "Copied from Powerbook on Dec 17, 2005"
4. Copy the project directory from the FW drive to the Powermac
5. Add comment to FW drive copy: "Copied to Powermac G5 on Dec 17, 2005"
6. Add comment to Powermac copy: "Copied from FW Drive on Dec 17, 2005"

When all this has occurred, the comments would read as follows...

Laptop copy:
Copied to FW Drive on Dec 17, 2005

FW drive copy:
Copied from Powerbook on Dec 17, 2005
Copied to Powermac G5 on Dec 17, 2005

Powermac G5 copy:
Copied from Powerbook on Dec 17, 2005
Copied from FW Drive on Dec 17, 2005

Obviously actions like renaming the project directory would get comments as
well.