Tone Parsons

This weekend was spent trying to clean up my music collection.

I’ve wanted all our CD’s ripped for quite a while. This way I can make burns of any/all of my music for the car, and more recently, for loading the iPods.

The first thing I did was take a long, hard look at my mp3’s. What a mess! I had duplicates all over the place, a bunch of songs that ended short, and some general garbage. So…. I scrapped most of them. Then I proceeded to grab handfuls of CD’s from our collection, in alphabetical order, take them down to my computer, and rip them, one at a time, to mp3 at 192kbs.

I was able to rip about 100 CD’s so far… but I’m only to the letter F (the last one I ripped was The Fixx – “One Thing Leads to Another: Greatest Hits”). I figure I should be done in a week or so, if I keep at it.

When ripping your collection, you discover quite a bit about yourself, musically at least. I’m apparently all over the place when it comes to music… and I have a lot of stuff that I forgot I purchased (sometimes more than one copy). I’ve got quite a bit of classic rock (CCR, Doors, Boston, Cream, etc.), a bunch of disco from the 70’s (ABBA, KC & the Sunshine Band, etc.), a ton of 80’s music, butt rock, glam rock, new wave, soundtracks, punk, break-beat, techno… hell, I’ve even got a bunch of “Christian” music in there.

I guess I’m not picky… if I like it, I buy it (and yes…. I have every single Depeche Mode CD released… plus 90% of the singles).

I figure I’ll be able to fill my iPod and then some when it’s all done 🙂

I just want to wish a happy valentine’s day to my love, my life, my wife.

Thank you for being who you are.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Tuesday!

Well, the “wonderful” part has yet to be verified, but it is most definately Tuesday…. the aftermath of Monday.

My old department is bugging me again (it’s about server backups this time), my back is a cranky beast, and my mind is full of fuzz from the medication. So… I guess it’s business as usual.

I spent most of last night fighting with Apple’s iTunes. I have never before been so frustrated with a program. I’m sure that the issues are totally with me (ie. I’m trying to do things the way I’ve done them with other applications), but moving music from my machine to my iPod is rather counter-intuitive.

One would think you can just drag the music you want onto the iPod icon and drop it (like every other piece of removable media in the world), but no… that’s not how it works. You have to mess with it, change all the default settings, tweak some more, and then maybe, just maybe… you can copy your files over.

Also… if you sync your iPod on one computer and attempt to add files from another, iTunes gives you the cyber version of the middle finger (I had to let it delete all my music I had synced from my laptop before I could copy files over from my PC).

grrrrrrrrrr….

I’ll figure it out… I know I will, it’s just a little frustrating at the moment (and I’m just venting… I haven’t read the help files yet, so I really shouldn’t bitch).

One nice thing about it… I moved over 1,000 songs to my little 30GB iPod and still have about 20GB left. Nice!! I guess I’ll need to keep ripping my CD’s to fill it up. I’m going to toy with using Apple’s ACC format instead of the usual mp3. I’ve been told that you get smaller file size with the same audio qualities as the 192kb rips I currently do.