Transition

Well, if you were one of the zero people who was looking at this blog you can stop looking now. This just hasn’t worked out for me. I wish I could say it was because I was super-busy in real life or something, but the honest truth is I just don’t care about doing this. It seemed like a good idea at first, but in practise it’s really pretty boring.

I don’t listen to my music in any particular order. I listen to what I want to hear at any given time. I got through the first couple of ABBA CDs (yes, I like ABBA) and decided that there was no way I was going to be able to listen to eight CDs’ worth of ABBA in a row. It’s too much. I started skipping around in my library. And then I discovered that the longer I put off listening to ABBA the less I wanted to listen to them. And by then a month had passed. So I just let it go. And now it’s been over a month since my last post.

I wish I could stick with this, but I don’t think I can. It’s tedious. I just don’t CARE. I’d rather talk about food. Food is a lot more interesting to me than music. Music is important to me, but there’s very little which MOVES me. Food, on the other hand…there is precious little in this world that makes me happier than cooking for friends. So I’m closing down the music aspect of the blog. I’m going to leave it open and start talking about food.

A Slight Hitch

My DVD burner blew up (not literally, thank goodness) just as I was finishing the “E”s. This is a small problem as my MacBook’s internal CD-RW isn’t in the greatest shape either. This means I’ll need to switch to my PC, which DOES have a working DVD burner, even if it’s a few years old. It also means I’ll need to re-think my encoding process.

To date I’ve ripped with iTunes and encoded using iTunes-LAME, an iTunes script which calls the LAME encoder to compress the WAVs I rip. Now I think I’ll have to start using EAC with LAME. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just start over? I’ve not heard any real problems with the earliest MP3s I encoded, but I’m hearing a bit of static (from the dying drives) in the most recent. I just don’t want to mess around with trying to find out where the static starts showing up in the library. All the PC needs is a new case fan and a power supply (the existing PS is making a horrible whining sound). Guess it’s time to take a trip to Fry’s.

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!