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Tower of song

It's a gorgeous spring day and I'm sitting inside, in front of the computer, gazing longingly at the sunny back yard. I have picked up the tail end of Dave's cold -- I skipped the usual gradual first steps of sickness and went right into the chest-full-of-thumbtacks cough. Ouch. It really hurts. Ouch.

That's why I'm not outside. So I've embarked on a very indoorsy project. I've decided to rip all of the CDs in our collection to MP3. Even though we have about 65 gigabytes of music already in iTunes, I estimate that that includes only about a third to a half of the actual physical CDs we own.

(Those 65 gigabytes already on the computer comprise nearly 14,000 tracks, or about 40 straight days of audio. That includes some audiobooks and podcasts, but it's mostly music. That's puny compared to this guy's collection. How much music do you all have on your computers?)

Once they're all ripped, I dunno, maybe we can get rid of a few or at least move the giant CD rack out of the corner of the room where it is collecting heaps of dust. The rack holds around 1,100 CDs. So I have somewhere around 500-700 CDs to rip.

The first step was to make a portable list of what's already on the computer, to make it easier for me to stand at the CD collection and pull out what needs to be ripped. I extracted a list of just artists and albums from iTunes and printed it. In two columns of 8-point text, it's 11 pages.

Now I'm inserting the CDs into the computer one by one, sucking the music off of them, and dusting and re-shelving them. I'm only on the second of 13 rows in the rack. I really hope I am back to good health before this project is finished.

April 20, 2007 12:41 PM