1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die

1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die is the official website companion to the book of the same title, by author (and NPR music critic) Tom Moon. This is the latest book in the 1,000 . . . Before You Die series, published by Workman Publishing. In creating the 1,000 Recordings website, we were starting with this excellent, substantial, body of writing about music. The website launched with a searchable / sortable version of the list of 1000 Recordings and a subset of all of the content and data from the book. It’s now filled out with all of the content and data—which is a lot. Having 1,000 content- and data-rich entries requires a lot of data entry and proofreading. We actually have more than 50 fields of potential data and content for each entry, so one might think about that as 50,000 chunks of content. And we’ve had interesting situations where some aspect of the entries looked right everywhere we checked—but our representative sample of 450 entries failed to expose a content issue effecting some other set of 100 entries! The site also now has links to buy CDs on Amazon for the vast majority of the 1,000 recordings. This was also a large undertaking, but was greatly aided by semi-automation, via Amazon Web Services.

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