To whom it may concern: The Sound Library series

For almost 10 years now I've been interested in the field of music called library music, and also in music related to it, like soundtracks and easy listening. At first I thought I would have enough to listen to if I bought all the CD compilations of that kind of music - the Easy Tempo series, the Soho Lounge, the Sound Gallery, the Jonny Trunk comps, the comps from the Dutton/Vocalion label and other remastered and re-issued stuff that has appeared since the retro easy listening boom of the 90s. But it just wasn't enough. I wanted more. So I took the step back to vinyl, having relied only on CDs for some years. I started buying the original library albums from which the tunes I liked had been taken. And I bought a new turntable and learned to digitize LPs to my PC. I soon found that the problem with library music is that the albums were not made and issued to be listened to in the same way as normal LPs in other fields. They were made to be used for something, not to be listened to as only music, the result being that one album could contain anything from ambient soundscapes or FX to 10-second jingles, or noisy avant-garde experiments alongside the sweetest bossa tunes. So the only thing to do was to start picking out the good tunes and make my private digital compilations out of those old original LPs. (By the way, I don't use the word mixtapes for anything else than physical cassettes, having grown up with real tapes.) 

After a while I started upgrading my equipment to get the best possible sound, and ended up with a Rega Planar 3 turntable with an Elys 2 cartridge, a tube pre-amp called Tube Box S, a NAD converter called PP4 and a PC program called VinylStudio (for those interested in the technical bit.) The sound this set-up gives is really impressive and much better than pure digital sound and in most cases better than re-mastered CD sound. (This is partly a matter of opinion, but my opinions are always the right ones. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about.) In addition to the ripping apparatus I bought a rather expensive record cleaning machine called Okki Nokki (!) that I always use before I rip the LPs, thereby making sure that the vinyl is as clean as possible and don't give off too much crackle, clicks or pops. If there's still some unwanted noise left after cleaning with Okki I use a program in my computer called WavePad, which has an easy-to-use function that makes it possible to isolate most clicks and pops and "manually" remove them without audible distortion of the sound. The final files are usually so clean and clear that they can't be distinguished from professionally issued CDs, except for the dynamics, which is even better than what you usually get on CDs. And the set-up described above also keeps the warmth that is embedded in the vinyl process. I don't use any tools like normalizing or equalizing or any other kind of boosting or so-called enhancing of the sound – the rips are as authentic as vinyl sound gets. I have only adjusted the volumes between the tracks and made appropriate spaces between them, to make the totality as perfect as I'm able to make it.

I apologize for this technical boring stuff; the music is after all the main thing here. I started making compilations out of the best tunes from my library LPs, but I soon discovered that they would be annoying and difficult to listen to if I put the tunes together hodge-podge, with only "library music" as the overriding header. So I started classifying and categorizing the tunes. Each time I heard an outstanding tune, a tune that I really liked and wanted to hear again, I wrote down the title, the name of the artist/group/orchestra, and the source (my rip, someone else's rip, a CD or a download source), and tried to place the tune under an appropriate heading, like "samba", "souljazz", "harpsichord", "crime funk", "happy music"… and soon I had literally hundreds of different compilation headings. I decided to limit each comp to 18 tunes (special label presentations are exceptions), resulting in a playing time of between 40-50 minutes. They are meant to be listened to with pleasure from track 1 to track 18 in one sitting and without interruptions.

My initial plan was to burn CD-Rs of these comps and give them away to interested friends. That's why I started making front and back covers to each of them. One should be able to take print-outs and have accessible tracklists, I thought. But when I discovered that some of my own CD-Rs had started to deteriorate and already had become unplayable after only a few years on a shelf, I decided that that trashy medium is not useful for any storing of good music. So now these comps only exist as folders of digital files in my computer. They are stored both as Flac files and Wave files, in the best possible sound quality (the music ripped and saved uncompressed at 44kHz/16 bit). 

Nevertheless I continued to make cover designs to each comp, and I have decided to present the covers here, both fronts and backs, as condensed information on what I've been doing and what I've been spending most of my time on lately. I claim no artistic originality or credit for the covers; they are only cut-and-paste jobs, put together by stuff found on the web and some scans I've done here at home. I suppose the tracklists would interest some people.

To share all this good music with interested friends and other good people would be a nice thing to do. It has cost me a great deal of money and time to collect the albums, restore the sound and put these compilations together. And music is made to be shared. That's the whole point of it. But I honestly don't know how I can do that without breaking someone's rules and become a target for Big Brother authorities who are eager to limit our freedom. But perhaps there are ways? Of a more private kind? None of these comps are uploaded anywhere. But in fact I feel more like a criminal by NOT sharing all this great music than I would if I shared it… But I have seen too many blogs close down and become quiet because of links that some greedy pleasure killers don't like. So I'm not gonna spend time here and end up wasting it.

There are 23 volumes in the series, presented here by their covers only. No use looking for any download links. They are numbered according to my master plan, not according to the sequence they were made. At the moment I'm working on 23 new ones. They are all in different stages of completion. On my master plan list there are as many as 271 volumes right now. I don't know if I'll ever get that far, but I'm planning to post the covers here when each new one is completed, and maybe also include some comments to each posting. Those who watch will see.  

Any comments and suggestions are welcome.