Monday, January 08, 2007
Erika has found a piano for Annie to practice on, and in order to make the necessary room for it in the dining room, I offered to put all of my CDs that are stored in that same room into storage.
I can do this because I have digitized/MP3s-ized all of our music and I never play the actual CDs anymore. With few exceptions I buy my music online, so its not like I need anything more than a simple box to put everything in. For copyright purposes I am keeping all of the CDs rather than selling them, though I know that the prospect of having the "copyright police" come after me for non-compliance is next to nil, so it's more for me than anything else.
All of my CDs have been ripped at 320kbps and reside on my "music machine" which has also become my iPod station by default. I have everything on that machine backed up on a large portable hard drive. And ever now and then I dump the latest contents onto a backup DVD disc as well and take them off site. This convenience and easy portability of music in this format is so much handier than comparatively bulky CDs (my portable CD player is gathering dust) that I can’t imagine going back at this point.
In the end I managed to fit my old CD collection into four large plastic boxes, and I stuffed them all into a storage area in the basement. I kept a few rare and oddball disks out so that I can scan their covers in order to add them to the MP3 files so that they appear on my iPod/iTunes, but then those few will end up joining the rest.
Erika is planning on using the large wooden CD storage unit for putting our shoes and boots in at the front hall. It was designed to hold 900 CDs comfortably; I guess now we will find out how good a shoe holder it is.
Labels: CDs, iPod, iTunes, MP3, piano
Friday, September 01, 2006
This has been a work in progress for the better part of the past couple of weeks. When I moved the captmondo.com to a new Web host (because the previous one I had used, WebRaided, went belly-up), I found that they offered scads of drive space, more than I could easily think of ways to fill.
On a whim I decided to see if the domain miscellaneous-s.com was taken. It wasn't, and ordering it for a year was only $10 U.S., so I picked it up and attached it to the CM site as a sub-domain.
I found a free CSS template I liked from AndreasViklund.com, modified it to suit my tastes, and started ripping my old "S" CDs into 128kbps MP3 files for download. I found the files that comprised the old site (which Toby Steel had previously hosted, and that I put originally together, some of the pages at least a decade old), salvaged what was still useful in terms of text and images, and started compiling things using the new template. Things came together surprisingly quickly, and I found some old pics and doc files that had never been used on the old Web site to expand things further. Spent the better part of an evening finding and compiling information on Alan Wright and Toby Steel, two band-members who both died in the summer of 2004. I intend to ad more, but am satisfied with the start I've made to what amounts to an online memorial to them both.
Earlier in the week I contacted the surviving members of the band and solicited their comments and input. Thankfully everybody approved of the project, with Ian submitting a story about doing the Peterborough concert, Pierre sending a piece on his remembrances of the "Big V" concert (one I will always regret not having performed at), and Bryce emailed the classic text for the "press release" announcing the official launch of the site.
The end result is very satisfying. Bill remarked that its likely audience is probably limited to just the band members and few else besides, but I can live with that. The "S" was always about silly fun, and this qualifies.
Labels: captmondo.com, CSS, Miscellaneous "S", MP3, WebRaided
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