Update

Well, I’ve gotten through the “C”s and am starting into the “D”s. Ripping and encoding my CDs has been labour intensive, but fun. I’ve discovered a few CDs I’d forgotten I had, and even found that I like some albums I hadn’t liked the first time I heard them. It’ll be interesting to see which albums and songs I listen to most.

The project officially begins next Saturday on my 41st birthday, and I hope someone out there will follow along. Even if nobody does, it will still be nice to have this blog as a journal of my listening experience.

The plan

Hi there. I’m Bruce. How ya doin’? I’m OK, but I’m getting old. I hate that, I really do. You get hair where there should be be hair, you get random aches and pains…you know, it’s a little like puberty without the horrible social awkwardness and acne.

I turn 41 on 5 April 2008, and on that magical date something very stupid will happen. I’ll start listening to my entire CD collection. I don’t know how long it will take, because I’ve got something like 1,300 CDs on the racks behind me. I’m going to try and keep track of it all with Last.FM, although frankly I’m not a big fan for various reason. Still, needs must do, and they’re the only game in town as far as I can see. It’ll take as long as it takes, and at the end of the year I’ll be able to take a look at my stats and see exactly how many tracks I listened to from which artists and…um, well, I don’t really know what I’ll do with that information. Preserve it for posteriority, I suppose. I’m also going to watch my entire DVD collection, which numbers in the low hundreds, I think. I haven’t actually counted. No way to keep track of that apart from just writing it down, I’m afraid.

And that’s where this blog will come into play. Since my own memory is fairly unreliable, I’ll use this as a means to keep track of who, what, when and what I thought afterward.

I plan to import my CDs to my MacBook using iTunes. Using an application called iTunes-LAME, I will encode the CDs to nice clean MP3s. I plan to start this process this week following a full backup and re-install of MacOS X. For some reason iTunes has started crashing when I insert an audio CD, hence the reinstall.

The DVDs I guess I’ll just watch in the bedroom on our TV. Or maybe I’ll encode them using Handbrake and watch them in iTunes. That might be fun. We’ll see.

So that’s it for now. See you in a month!