Andy Roberts

Right then folks, I now have 499 videos on the andyrobertsmusic youtube account which is almost far too many. So what I need to do is to delete some, or maybe a lot of them. The thing is, how to go about it? I could choose the best version of each song, delete the rest. Remove all covers. Remove any older than 1 year with less than 50 views and no comments. Or something more subtle? I’d be very interested in any opinions you may have out there, it can be a bit like talking to myself and singing to myself sometimes. Even though there have been over 200,000 individual views altogether.

Frankie asks if there is any way of meaningfully grouping them into covers, original songs, etc and the answer is that there are two ways so far. The covers are grouped using the youTube playlists facility, as playlists curated by the same account, and these are then rendered onto pages on the main navigation of this wordpress site.

Sop the page ‘http://andyroberts.me/covers‘ has links to child pages:

• The Beatles
• Bob Dylan,
• Roy Harper,
• Loudon Wainwright
• Others

Similarly, for my original songs the page at http://andyroberts.me/albums has links to child pages 

• The Last Nail 2010
• Album 1 2008
• Sampler CD 2009
• Gernika 2005
• The Andy Roberts Tapes 1980

This system however relies upon me remembering to get around to adding each newly uploaded youTube video to one or more playlists which I don’t always get around to doing.

The second method of grouping the videos is easier to maintain as far as the original songs are concerned because each song has a Wiki page with links to most if not all youtube URLs for each song. That makes it possible to choose the best one and have it rendered as an embedded playable video not just a url link. I’m already part way through doing these. The songs are then grouped into albums etc through the categories links at the bottom of each page eg: http://andyroberts.me/wiki/Category:Gernika

One of the advantages of having it all laid out on a wiki I discovered is when I am out and about doing for example a floor spot somewhere, if I suddenly decided to revive an old song I can quickly look it up on my iPad and refresh my memory of the lyrics or tuning, or even stick the pad on a music stand and play from it like that. That beats leafing through a ring binder I feel.