Help me choose an upgrade path for my vintage site and get my info to a database?

How many recordings are there? If it's just a couple hundred or less I'd be inclined to go with MIT's http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/ javascript application which would store the data as a flat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON text file. There are instructions and tools in the documentation for generating the data file from an Excel or Google spreadsheet. Plus, since it would all be flat files you wouldn't have to worry about maintaining and upgrading, etc., of a database.

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book, but you can adapt those instructions to handle pretty much anything, once you get the hang of it.

You absolutely could use Wordpress for this... but you will probably need to do a fair bit of custom work. There are probably more appropriate projects to use it on. However, if you want to learn how to use it, why not? There's a vibrant ecosystem out there with tons of resources.

This is the sort of problem I used Rails to solve, too: I built an app that helps me browse a 500GB music collection. I started with a simple Rails schema, then wrote a little file crawler in Ruby to populate my database with title, artist, album, bitrate, track number and file path. I've got the whole project sitting here, so if you're interested feel free to drop me a MeMail and I'll either get the (rough, old-for-rails) code up onto github or make it otherwise available. I got into Rails in the first place because paying money for a commercial database application like Access or Filemaker seemed pointless, and Rails' scaffolding made it easy to get something that worked right away, but I could add functionality to over time. If you've already got PHP, Ruby will be pretty simple to pick up. If you've already got SQL, you can either enjoy taking a break from it with ActiveRecord (the Rails database library) or just use SQL within ActiveRecord. If you're interested in burnishing your Drupal résumé and have decent PHP chops, I'll take this opportunity to point out the http://drupal.org/project/migrate, which allows you to take an existing non-Drupal table (or tables) and map the fields within to Drupal http://drupal.org/project/cck or content fields.

Please post a link to it in your profile when you finish. I really appreciate all that Robert Hunter did for and with the band. Garcia was so well complimented by Hunter.

Wordpress, because you get so much functionality for free. Especially if you used one of the many free plugins. The tricky part is, as you've identified, importing all the data. You could simply use the built-in content types (blogs posts or pages) but you could also create new ones that are tailor made for your data. So if you have dozens of pages about concerts of charities and the pages are fairly uniform, you could create a concert or charity custom type. There are great wordpress plugins that makes it fairly straightforward to http://podscms.org/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/types/ content types. Then there's creating a theme that presents all the data. You could http://themeforest.net/ a theme and tweak it for your needs. You could also use a so called http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/34-free-wordpress-theme-frameworks-and-starter-themes-with-a-comparison-chart/ to create your own theme from scratch. If Wordpress seems interesting but a bit overwhelming, feel free to mefi mail me your questions.

it's been a while for me but does http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php allow you to import data? (it does - just checked) Get the data into excel whatever - export it as CSV or tab Delimited files the import into your pre defined table structure with phpMyAdmin I have not had experience with Drupal or Wordpress

Thanks so much for the answers, everyone - this is exactly the kind of feedback I needed. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me to just dump the info in Excel and go from there - that's by far the easiest starting point, I think. I agree that this might be the perfect opportunity to dip my toes in the Rails pool - that might never have occurred to me, even though "do something with Rails" has been on my list for a while now. Oh, and XMLicious - I hadn't seen that Exhibit thing before, but I think I have another little project that might need just exactly that!

I am going to say that Drupal+ Migrate module will do this pretty easily. Use Views to build out the front end, node to build out the entry point. Getting it pretty might be the bigger challenge.