Introduction: Early in the year 2000 I bought Teldec's "Bach 2000 - Complete Bach Edition". It has always been my dream to have everything by Bach available at my fingertips for listening and/or reference. I think it's great.

At first I didn't really listen to the collection as much as its price tag warranted because it was somewhat inconvenient taking the boxes down from the shelf, looking up which CD I needed, and then putting the CD in my carousel CD-player.

Clearly the best way was to have all this music on my computer in MP3 format. So in late 2000 I spent about a month of all my free time ripping and encoding every one of the 153 CDs into MP3 format (using the lame 3.87 encoder under Linux). I did a quick and dirty job, since I really just wanted to get everything on the computer as fast as possible. I did not type in any titles, artists or anything that did not come from the CDDB lookup (which was non-existent for many of these CDs anyway).

After that I listened to this collection of music A LOT more. It was so easy to point and click on any piece I wanted. I usually went by BWV number because there wasn't anything else but the most basic title that I put in. It also lacked Artist information, recording dates, and a lot of other information that I wanted, but wouldn't even fit in the MP3 tags.

Fast-forward 2 years into the future: Ogg Vorbis 1.0 has been released, and I have the time and means to redo it all over again, and this time do it right. It took a lot more patience this time around, but at least I could listen to the old MP3 playlist while I worked. :-)

I didn't just start the project without preparation. I wrote a script to help me automate the process as much as possible. I spent months refining this script and encoding other CDs before starting this project.

It took well over a month to do this, which is why I am posting my work on the web to serve as a reference or perhaps save someone else some time as well. And BTW, someone ought to use this information to update the CDDB database for these discs. Feel free to contact me about this.

I was very thorough in making sure all this information is accurate, however there still may be mistakes (not just from me, but also possibly the source that I copied from (mainly the Bach 2000 CD pamphlets)). All I ask in return is that if you see a mistake, please inform me at charlton@dynet.com.

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