iPod-less?
with the inspiration of sunni snake and her technical staff, i’m slowly moving my hundreds of CDs over to hard drive. even for those without an iPod (or similar), i highly recommend the process. it makes listening to CDs far less of a chore, and the shuffle capabilities are like having an ultracool radio station on tap without any commercials.
why now, in 2005? that’s one from the “cobbler’s children go shoeless” school, since i was a recording studio pro for many years. when i had a square job, i just used a drawer full of CDs, which often kept me going during long programming sessions. never transferred any to hard drive, and i’m not sure why, other than that i was fine doing the medium dance. i know most people reading this are 5 years ahead of me on this, but maybe some aren’t.
remember the freedom you felt when you first realized you didn’t have to flip over a CD, as with vinyl? the transition of your library to hard drive is far better. loading disks used to be fun, with that cool motorized tray that we now take for granted. i just want to listen though, and with this recent change i’m listening far more to music, and enjoying it very much. it’s wonderful to hear a shuffled track of a CD you own come up and you don’t know who it is. never got that when listening to whole CDs, since i was the one who put it in the player.
for my transfers, i’m using EAC (Exact Audio Copy), a great “cardware” program (you send a nice postcard to the author) by a guy who’s extra geeky about getting accurate data from CDs. a little weird getting it set up and learning to use with the limited online help at the site (native german speaker, i think), but there’s so much at other sites about it that you can get even weird questions answered quickly via google.
after a couple hours messing with the setup, i now have pristine .wav transfers going like a factory, with the tracks automatically creating and routing to a directory/file structure based on artist, CD title, track number, and track name. a great feature of the program for dial-up people with 10-hr daily time limits (me) is that you just preload all your CDs in one shot, letting EAC see them for half a second so it gets the disc ID. then the next time you log on, you get all your info in one batch download. it’s automatic as hell, though sometimes you have to deal with slightly shoddy data. no big deal, and i’ve learned how to correct it and resubmit so that it updates the master database at freedb.org, another great recent discovery for cave man salty. you can submit limited-run CDs, such as i just did for an album recorded at my studio years ago (2 songs from it are here, along with the title track from a previous album i did with them — apparently “mastered” for the MP3 from a mangled cassette tape. heh). so if somebody now rips that CD with freedb.org compatible software, they’ll have the information i provided, and not have to type it in.
the CD information thing is at heart a bummer of poor planning though. an entire industry and millions of hours of frustration are built around the failure of the original CD standard to include something kinda important — like, you know, maybe the fucking artist and track names! ROFL. isn’t that crazy?
has anybody noticed that there’s a solid, individualist anarchist twinge coming through in the last few years from traditionally socialist circles? some of it’s anti-capitalism, but it’s still headed in the right direction overall: individual power. freedb.org is basically a sizeable “fuck you” to the original system, and it’s working very well. another great thing is that every time we engage in communal help such as wikipedia and freedb.org, wealth is bypassing the tyrants at the IRS empire of criminal filth.
windows media player tells me that i’m just over 60 hours of CD material, and i’m only barely into this project. guess a new hard drive is on the horizon, since i prefer to keep all of my data in the original format — what .wav files essentially are, from what i’ve read. at 38 gigs and climbing, i’m paying the price for not translating to another format.
this will probably lead to me buying a portable gadget and going through the hell of evaluating which compression method to use, but for now i’m damned happy just dancing through my collection at home. name one radio station that’s going to move from debussy to dead kennedys, then swing ‘er straight with johnny burnett. the shuffle stuff is far cooler than i thought it would be.
May 15th, 2005 at 06:19
You’re doing that on dialup? I’m impressed. And yah, shuffle is cool. I also like making specific playlists, although I’ve not exploited that as much as I could.
May 15th, 2005 at 06:49
i love dial-up. can do pretty much everything i need to. you just keep loading pages in the background. LOL. it’s a real air traffic control deal.
only thing that kills me is the fucking time limit. i’m always logging on and off to get around it. can’t beat it for $6/mo though, with numbers all around the US.
May 15th, 2005 at 12:17
That is dirt cheap. You’d probably have a stroke if I told you how much we’re paying per month for our satlink.
May 15th, 2005 at 13:35
it’s worth in you case, i guess. right? do you find excuses to suck down data constantly, or does it mainly just sit there?
May 15th, 2005 at 14:45
I used to get free dialup through my university, but I switched to high speed a few months ago. I did it so that I could download shn and flac files, which are compressed files that are lossless, unlike mp3s. They’re a lot bigger than mp3s, but smaller than wavs.
The problem with not utilizing small lossy files like mp3s is hard drive space. I have a 40 gig hard drive, but I usually only have 1-2 gigs free since I’m downloading 2-5 live recordings a night, and it takes awhile to burn them to CD with an old 2x burner. There’s no way I could upload my entire CD collection, unless I had close to a terabyte of free space.
That freedb site is pretty cool.
May 15th, 2005 at 15:28
jeez, freeman. how many CDs you got, holmes?
May 15th, 2005 at 16:59
Yah, it’s worth it. When I was doing the FMN gig, I had to be online for 5-7 hours at a time (for FND), and often needed to take care of other stuff immediately. Now, we have multiple users who need/want to be online at the same time over the course of any given day.
And here I was thinking our music collection was impressive … freeman easily has us blown away.
May 15th, 2005 at 17:06
just between you and me, i wouldn’t believe a fucking thing that freeman critter says.
and even if it’s true, i’ll bet he doesn’t have this. (make sure he doesn’t see that link, or he’ll run out and get it just to be really cool).
May 15th, 2005 at 20:02
LMAO! You mean there’s more than one song in that genre? ;-)
May 16th, 2005 at 14:41
5.29 gigs, 1,228 songs, thank you WinMX (all on dial up) and AudioGrabber to rip the rest.
Using a Rio Cali Sport, with SD ram I can upgrade to about a gig.. Any more memory and it’s all day to find that one freakin’ song that I want…plus, it takes the sweat, rain and beating that mtn biking provides. $59 bucks, hell I bought two. ‘course, I’m not cool like those with the white cord and all. I don’t mess with high speed, even when I’m somewhere I can, ….its all in what you’re used to, and dial up suits a brother fine.
May 16th, 2005 at 15:15
hear hear!
May 16th, 2005 at 15:42
White cord?
May 16th, 2005 at 15:48
iPod.
May 16th, 2005 at 17:45
Guess that shows I’m not cool. :-)
May 16th, 2005 at 18:05
sunni snake, you are cooler than cool. i’d even go so far as to say you’re poikilothermic.
May 16th, 2005 at 23:35
LOL!! You’ve been listening in again, SaltyPig. And thanks for the much-needed laugh …
May 17th, 2005 at 01:11
Who knows how many CDs I own. What I do know is that as of right now, I have 625 live recordings of various artists.
There’s a link on my blog that goes to my online list of recordings. If you wanna test me to see if I actually own the shows listed, pick out a few that attract your interest and shoot me an email (j_free_s@yahoo.com). I’ll hook you up.
May 17th, 2005 at 07:25
listening in, sunni? were you talking about that somewhere recently? hadn’t seen it if you were.
freeman, i believe ya. but thanks for the email address. was looking for your email address a few weeks ago and didn’t find one for you anywhere on your site.
May 17th, 2005 at 14:47
I meant the “listening in” literally, SaltyPig; Lobo calls me a hot-blooded poikilotherm. Sorry for the confusion. (Salon’s almost done! Yay!)
May 17th, 2005 at 17:24
lobo thinks you’re hot-blooded? you wouldn’t have given him any reason to think that, would ya? LOL
good news on the salon. lotta sex and stuff this issue?
May 17th, 2005 at 17:36
Uh, no sex, I think (reason #269 why the freedom philosophy isn’t, er, propagating as fast as it should). Shall I hide another underthings comment here somewhere to make up for that lack (and to put your blog ahead of Freeman’s in that count)?
May 17th, 2005 at 18:11
yes. spring that on me out of the blue again one day. i like when i’m not expecting it. but maybe we can move up to the 16 or 17 age range, at least?
; )
“you mean the panties your mother laid out for you?”