About Me

Even as a small child, I was very interested in music and got a lot of pleasure from my brother's record collection. Since about 1982 I started to buy records and CDs from my first self-earned money as a newspaper boy. My focus is to collect all released songs of an artist, not all released LPs or CDs (see Info).

My collection became large very quickly because I had a lot of favorite artists. At first my focus was on Pop music (e.g. Madonna, George Michael, Simply Red, Swing Out Sister and Wet Wet Wet), then later R&B and Soul (e.g. Whitney Houston, Vesta Williams and Will Downing). Finally, my love for Jazz music developed (e.g. David Benoit, Russ Freeman, Hiromi Uehara, Diana Krall and Jane Monheit).

99,9% of the recordings listed are also in my collection, only three recordings are missing:

• Oleta Adams: Self-titled Cassette from 1986 (Rolling Snowball Productions)
• James Ingram: Someone Like You / Maxi-CD from 1993 (Warner Bros. Records Australasia - 5439185312)
• Marlene with Seawind: Summer Nights / Promo 12"-Maxi from 1982 (CBS/Sony Japan - XDAH 93023)

Since 2009, I have been able to enjoy my passion for music in the form of LP-Reviews, which I write for the german HiFi magazine "LP - Magazin für analoges HiFi & Vinyl Kultur".

I have been running this website as a non-profit project since 1999. Initially, the website was available at www.musik-datenbank.de, later www.soul-jazz-pop.com and www.discographies.online. Since 2009, the web address has been music-was-my-first-love.com, inspired by the legendary song by John Miles from 1976. Due to indexing problems of google, since May 2025 the web address finally changed to artistarchiv.es.

I had the honour of providing some label scans for the 2009 reissue of the significant album "What Am I Gonna Do" by Gloria Scott, produced by Barry White (Reel Music - 66748-78012-2, Universal Music Special Markets - B0012577-02).

Over the years, personal contacts to some musicians have developed through my collection.

The code for this website was created entirely by Anthropic's AI system Claude.

I have digitized most of my entire collection, regardless of the medium on which it was released, on my Mac computer. I use the AAC format (M4A file extension) with a resolution of 320 kbit/s.

On my computer, I manage my music using Music.app (formerly known as iTunes). My main sorting criterion is the artist I am focusing on, under which all albums are listed that were either released under that artist's name or on which they participated as a guest musician. Compilations/Soundtracks that include songs by the artist are also sorted under them. Only songs from the respective album in which the artist in question is involved are included in the Music app. I organize the sorting of albums within the artist via an entry in the "Album Sort" field. This categorization means that songs featuring several artists in my collection are represented multiple times in my music database.

Within the artist, the Albums/EPs/Maxis appear first in ascending order by release year, followed by the albums on which the artist is featured as a guest musician (in ascending order by year), and finally the Compilations/Soundtracks on which the artist is featured (in ascending order by year).

Each individual file is tagged so that I can keep track of everything and display albums according to specific criteria. However, I don't use the "Genre" criterion because it's not practical. In addition, there are many albums that could be assigned to multiple genres, but this is not possible in Music.app. The only exception is the "Christmas" genre, which I use to tag entire albums or individual tracks on an album so that I can access this type of music specifically during the Christmas season, whether it's Jazz, R&B, or Pop.

I constantly synchronize my music (and all other data on my computer) with pCloud to prevent data loss and to be able to access my data from anywhere.

For mobile music enjoyment, I use iBroadcast, where I have uploaded all my music. There, I have tagged it completely so that I can quickly access Solo Albums/EPs, Maxis, Promos, Bootlegs, Collaborations, Guest Appearances, and Samplers/Soundtracks within an artist, sorted in ascending order by year.

Over the years, I have managed my collection using various database systems. I started with Lotus Approach, then moved on to Microsoft Access, then Bento and FileMaker, Ninox, and Tap Forms. After initially managing my collection with Airtable for a while so that I could access it from anywhere, I eventually switched to NocoDB and now store the data on my own web server. This system also provides the data for this website.