Digitizing music

@yakkoTDI Excuses? For … you?
Or what?

@Kyeh Not for me. Stop by, have a beer and some chili and I will tell you all about it.

@yakkoTDI
Oh, okay. Next time I get to Texas!

@yakkoTDI Good luck with that. My mom never listened to any of my advice.

@Kyeh By Texas I assume you mean West Central Florida.

@yakkoTDI Oh! I guess I do. Gee, then I could visit @PoolToyWolf as well, and see the museum where he gives tours.
I guess it was your cacti that made me think Texas.

@Kyeh I think @PooltoyWolf is Central Central Florida or East Central Florida. There is another train museum by me so we can double up on the big iron.

@PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI
Florida really loves its trains, huh?
I attended a wedding on a train once - it went up to the mountains and back, and it had great viewing cars and wonderful food. Most unusual wedding I’ve been to.
We’ve got a pretty big train museum in CO as well: https://coloradorailroadmuseum.org/

@Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI
If any y’all pass by St Louis, there is The National Museum of Trains (tnmot.org) that has almost 200 exhibits of engines and cars to look at up close. It’s in the suburb or Des Peres, MO.

The Museum’s rail and transit collections have grown to encompass more than 190 major exhibits. Our collection is recognized as the largest collection of transportation vehicles in the world.

There is also the nearby Wabash, Frisco, and Pacific Railroad (www.wfprr.com) that operates Sundays only, May through October.

Along with these other area train routes:
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/missouri/train-rides-mo/

@mike808 @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI Wow!

@Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI hey…don’t forget me! I’m in West Central Florida too

@llangley @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI
Nice!!! And maybe we could swing by and ask @Weboh to let us try some of his wonderful fruit!

@Kyeh @yakkoTDI Orlando suburbs!

@Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI
Stop and use the pool on the way thru central AL if you are driving…

@chienfou @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI
I’d love to! Thanks!

@llangley @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI
I’ve never been to Florida, but a summer trip there might have tipped the balance in my father’s favor when he was courting my mom. They met at the campus library, but she wasn’t sure about him. Then he and his college roomie went and camped on a Florida beach, and he wrote her interesting, funny, thoughtful letters. So she gave him a chance.

@Kyeh @PooltoyWolf I got family near Altamonte Springs and when it isn’t coviding outside I get over there pretty regularly.

@Kyeh @llangley @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI

You want to take a “winter” trip to Florida.

Not summer, unless you want a very personal introduction to a lot of of mosquitoes.

(if you drive to Florida stop at the welcome station when you cross the state line I haven’t been to one in a while, but they used to have fresh squeezed orange juice handed out)

Winter, OTOH … OK sometimes they get a real cold front and sometimes it even gets freezing and they have to try to save their citrus Groves

But mostly, g a cold snap in Florida means it 60° in the winter.

/image Florida winter 2

@f00l @Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI it was 45° in Tampa this morning and it’s not even December yet

@Kyeh @llangley @PooltoyWolf @yakkoTDI

45F in Tampa in Nov?
Wow. Unusual.
Or I hope it’s still unusual.

What I remember is people wearing sweaters when temps were 65F because of nostalgia for winter.

@Kyeh That’s the plan.

@speediedelivery

I did just order a barcode scanner

Cue Cat?

@yakkoTDI I have a cue cat but never had good luck with it. Maybe I should try again since I just got a cancellation notice for the one I ordered. Says out of stock but I can reorder for almost double the price.

@speediedelivery I love my barcode scanner. So far, I’ve just used it for DVDs using this software. That has a lifetime license.

For CDs, I have this software. Just licensed for a year. Not that I needed it because I ripped the disks to a hard drive and that grabbed all the information needed for cataloging. I bought the software before I decided to rip them all.

I set up an NAS last year (wrote about it in my diary; I’ve since upgraded the router to an Asus, because the wifi dropouts were just too annoying, especially with the webcams in the backyard - really needed to keep an eye on Simon to see how he was getting out of the yard after decades of no escapees). I have a Buffalo NAS, just one internal hard drive and a couple of external hard drives. Music, movies and television shows. Roku shares the Plex files.

I found an app to share the music files as playlists on Alexa! A year license is six bucks.

I look at my old equipment and just shake my head. I have a technics turntable, an onkyo receiver with the pre-amp for the turntable, a dual cassette player, a 100 disk CD player, two cd recorders, only one of them worked with rewriteable disks - I’d record songs off of vinyl onto a rewriteable disk, easy enough to fix if I screwed up, once I had it the way I wanted it, I’d record that onto a regular disk. Back then, the vehicles didn’t work with disks burned via the computer. The car didn’t work with disks that weren’t labeled as "music CD’.

Technology has sure come a long way.

And I’m lovin’ it!

@speediedelivery @yakkoTDI I couldn’t get my cue cat to work. I ended up getting this one.

@lisaviolet I have folders for my audiobooks and ebooks by authors then sub folders for each book. I have done some music but still have a bunch to go. Nothing on your scale but still daunting. I will check out those links for organizing. I like the idea of accessing with Alexa. I have a nifty enabled speaker from an Irk to try it out.

I have been purchasing ebooks with the plan of downsizing my book shelves. It has not worked so far I like the portability of my kindle and having a bunch of books to match my mood at my fingertips.

@speediedelivery There’s nothing like the feel and smell of a book.

@lisaviolet @speediedelivery

smell of a book

Yeah, I’ve got some old musty ones too.

@phendrick @speediedelivery I love that smell.

@lisaviolet @speediedelivery
I had an off brand kindle and downloaded a bunch of books to it. After I read those books I went back to real books. I have problems holding holding and reading both bc of nerve damage in my neck that affects my neck, shoulder, back and arm. It’s still the feel of a book and it’s more comfortable to hold, at least for me.
I used to save all my books after reading them and had a massive collection and after moving twice with them I was done. I now (usually) only buy used book and sell them when I’m done. If it was a very, very very good read I might, might keep it but I’d rather have room for new books or things like my gardening books and photo albums intend of keeping them in boxes.

@speediedelivery @Star2236 I was raised in a military family that moved every two or three years and a lot of stuff was left behind.

When dad retired and I moved out on my own, I had a really hard time getting rid of stuff. You’ll notice in my original post, next to the CDs, there’s a bookshelf full of Stephen King.

We have nice bookcases in the family room and I’d love to clean those out. A full set of encyclopedia Brittanica, full sets of the Time/Life mysteries and paranormal books. I need to find a place to donate them.

Way too many cookbooks.

I have a hard time staying focused reading on an ebook. I haven’t always, when they first came out, I enjoyed the hell out of it. But, like you, I’ve gone back to printed books.

@speediedelivery I was just using my Cue Cat for barcode scanning into an Excel sheet and it worked great.

@lisaviolet @speediedelivery
I understand why you keep things. I wish I had a good reason for my hoarding besides I just like stuff. Not saying that your a hoarder just made me think of myself.

@lisaviolet @speediedelivery
That “old book smell” is so popular that there are perfumes and candles made to convey it; you can even get a necklace with the chemical symbols for “Acetic Acid, Furfural, Benzaldehyde, Hexanol and Vanillin” strung on a chain. I have this perfume and I like it, but I’ve spent more hours in libraries than maybe anywhere else in my life, and none of them smelled like this:

@Kyeh @lisaviolet @speediedelivery Maybe you’ll just have to take a trip to Oxford & visit all the local libraries to track down the scent! I volunteer to be your assistant!

@ircon96 @lisaviolet @speediedelivery
Oxford UK? Or one of the 24 Oxfords in the US?
I wouldn’t mind visiting the Bodleian. But whatever library we go to I’m pretty sure the only way it will smell like that perfume is if I’m wearing it.

@Kyeh @lisaviolet @speediedelivery Lol, you’re probably right, but it sure would be fun to do the detective work! And i concur with the Bodleian. I was assuming, since it’s a French product, they were referring to the UK, but i haven’t been anywhere in so long, i think I’d be willing to go to just about any of the Oxfords at this point!

@ircon96
Visiting the great libraries of the world could be a fantastic travel theme! Kind of like people who travel to climb mountains; not my thing at all even though I’m in CO.

@Kyeh I’m 100% with you on the library theme vs. mountain climbing.

@lisaviolet @phendrick @speediedelivery

I truly love the smell and feel of a book. But I only own a few now by a few. I probably need 1000 or fewer.

Some of them are elsewhere right now in boxes. I need to go retrieve and stuff so I’m not sure about the count.

For me I guess that’s a few because in the old days I bought so many periodically just had to give them away or take them to a used bookstore because there was no way I was gonna have the space to store them

But now I own an embarrassing number of audiobooks that are legally purchased and all that

Plus the larger number of e-books that are legally purchased and may be a few that aren’t but basically I’ll wait till they get cheap and I buy them

And as for the e-books, I don’t usually read them on a Kindle or similar unless there’s a lot of charge of diagrams or it’s a technical book or a book where the formatting is very important

Instead I just get iOS or android to read the e-book aloud to me so I turned it into an audiobook
I do that when no professionally narrated version exists

I think I forgotten how to sit still and read unless I’m studying something

Although as a kid, I was up every night for hours under the covers with a flashlight, and then I had to spend all my allowance and kid earnings buying books and also batteries so that mom wouldn’t notice the flashlight was always dead

I probably am busy listening to audiobooks when I should be making my life better

But everybody’s got vices, right?

—

Among the books I own that are physical my own way two many copies of everything token just because those were the first books. I fell seriously totally head over heels in love with and wanted to live in that world when I was I guess late elementary school? a friend‘s brother was in university when they took off on the college campuses and he brought home copies for us and we were obsessed with it for months and months, even though it only took us about a week to read it all

I own other copies of book special to me and photography books and stuff like that

Usually don’t keep technical books because they age out

@lisaviolet @speediedelivery @Star2236

I once had a cd and vinyl lib about maybe 1/3 the size of yours. Mostly purchased 40 years ago at cool tiny record shops in Manhattan.

Part of me still wishes I had your dilemma to face

But at one point when I was living in another location all that was in storage and a fire was set deliberately to cover a theft in another unit and it spread to my unit also and I lost my collection

Part of me deeply regrets it

another part is kind of glad because I don’t have to deal with making decisions about it now that you are making with yours, because I know I would’ve procrastinated till now, and then I would procrastinate for another decade

I commend your energy in taking this song

I hope you don’t lose too much quality in the process of digitizing your music

—-

With the CDs there’s already a change in sound

But with the vinyl if they were well mastered than the beginning, you might just wanna keep them as is and use a turntable to get the full sound
Maybe even get yourself a tube amp

—-

when I see that some classic album has been remastered …

I used to think they used new tech to pull all the sound off the original recordings and make it sound as rich as possible like a live show

—-

But now when I see the word remastered, I wonder if they didn’t just pitch correct everything and remove all the tiny errors and individual expressions and choices that make a live recording, truly individual and dynamic

I wonder if I don’t listen to music so much anymore because technology has flattened so much of it out and you don’t get a sense of it being connected to the original performance that would’ve happened in a 1950s thru 80s recording studio

as for the current generation of pop music stars I know the bigger names who they are and maybe one or two of their songs

But it all feels so damned factory manufactured

It’s not stuff I wanna hear all day in the background or foreground of my life

—-

I remember in my teenage and later years, driving down the road with some crappy radio and having a fave song come on and plan as loud as damn possible and getting so into it

Then along came the end of individually, DJ programmed music stations and they all had to fit their damned formats and play next song according to the “please the middle ground” algorithm

And with CDs somehow even artist, I love started to feel flattened out in the sound

—-

And at the same time audiobooks exploded when CDs came along because the publishers could produce unabridged versions easily enough

(Most consumers were ok with say 8-10 cds in a nice case bit didn’t want to deal with boxes and boxes or cassettes that a longish book needed for unabridged)

And with CDs instead of cassettes, a really long book was manageable

The flattened out sound doesn’t matter if you’re not doing full fidelity music but you’re only doing spoken word

Than a long came faudible and it’s various competitors

And along came the iPod and my goodness I still love my iPod classic, even though I barely use it anymore. It’s still loaded with audiobooks.

And yeah, I know I supposedly only have rights to my library as long as audible and other companies say so

But most of my audiobook lib is all backed up in m4b, so fuck them if they decide to take some part of my library away.

I don’t buy audiobooks from Apple because I don’t think you can play on android without jumping through hoops so why bother

Own maybe a few from Google maybe 50? Probably bought them all because of some absurd deal or sale

Barnes & Noble I used to buy from those are difficult to back up, but I don’t own that many and I’m not gonna mess with it if I wanted to I could use one of those programs that place the audiobook fast and create a recording that you can then slow down, but I’m not gonna bother

I own a few on kobo, but not enough to care about

I think I own one or two on Books A Million but I don’t even know how you play those and I don’t remember what the books might be.

Way too many from Audible in spite of their sometimes sucky player app.

I now own a whole bunch purchased from chirpbooks, because they have such great sales, but I haven’t bothered trying to make my own local copies of those yet. I don’t know what it ripping a chirpbooks version would involve.

I think I have some crazy audiobook purchasing compulsion fetish thing

I probably need to get the addiction under control, but I do not feel highly motivated at this exact moment to control my addiction
(even though the whole Amazon monopoly and abuse-employees thing pisses me off greatly)

I’ll never listen to all my audiobooks. I just love having a huge library of my own. It’s like going to the main library when I was a kid. And having all those books to choose from

Only now I go to my own backed up audiobook collection or I go to my Audible account or some other account and I just wander around till I see something I wanna listen to

sort of like getting to live full time in the library of my dreams.

Right now I’m on a “history of the space race” binge.

Addictions like these probably don’t make one’s life better in any productive or creative sense, but these “harmless habits” suit my self-indulgent preferences so well that it’s hard to give up my personal version of crack

/giphy addicted

@mike808 I’m not selling them.

@mike808 I love EAC it has ripped almost every CD I have given it. I need to fire it up again and copy everything I have acquired since the last batch run.

@yakkoTDI The plugin to lookup cover art, track listings, liner notes, etc looks useful for $8.

By “high quality”, I mean a high sampling bit rate, meaning less compression. Lossy compression like AAC and MP3 inherently mean information is lost from the original and you can’t ever get it back. Lose enough information (high enough compression, or “low quality”) and you notice the degradation.

More important than the sampling rate is like to be the original sound recording engineer’s dynamic range shaping (also called compression, but of a completely different thing). When CDs were new, sound engineers squashed the dynamic range, which effectively made the high frequencies “brighter” and everything sounded equally “loud”, particularly for pop/radio tracks. Just like old 45s were engineered to sound “good” on mono car radios in the 50s with shitloads of midrange and almost no bass or high treble. The speakers of the time just weren’t capable enough.

Now, different genres have their own “profiles” with directional shaping, reverb, dynamic range compression and clipping, now that all of those can be manipulated programmatically.

@heartny Mine are already digitized (binary), as in they either are worth listening to, or not. Mostly, not. (Those last, I just keep in my old truck with its ancient AM//FM/tape player.)

@heartny @phendrick I’ve got a few, but I was big on mix tapes back in the day. Which I made from my lps.

Most of the cassettes I have were left in my truck at work by admirerers.

Seriously. I was adorable back then. (Key words “back then”. It was over thirty years ago.)

@heartny @phendrick Yeah, I still have 2 vehicles with cassette players. They were new enough (1997 and 2000) to have the deluxe combo of cassette AND that newfangled CD thing. But sadly no 3.5mm audio jack so I can’t easily play a digital device through it (usually for audiobooks). I know they make “cassette adapters” which create a magnetic signal that might be read by the “tape head” but from my experience they are pretty bad if they work at all in your setup.

@heartny @lisaviolet I bet you’re still adorable, since “beauty is only skin deep”, as Olay and botox practitioners like to say.

@heartny @phendrick Aw, you’re too kind…

@heartny @lisaviolet @phendrick

I find that it is a certain point in life. We just stopped looking in mirrors unless we have to.

@pmarin I subscribed to Pandora a long time ago. It’s why I wanted to have my own stuff on a hard drive for access around the house. I said “google next” too many times. lol But I still listen to it on occasion.

I have Alexa set up in Brian’s shop where he works all day (an old echo that has a bad speaker - using the auxiliary output to a speaker that works). The speaker isn’t the best, but he’s running machinery most of the day so sound quality doesn’t matter that much to him. He listens to country.

My father was an audiophile. I’m pretty sure I inherited this talent (cough, cough) from him.

@pmarin Same here with a slightly different theme. Curated community submissions of playlists consisting of 8 tracks in a theme. Hence the name 8tracks.com

Basically an 8 track playlist will get you through 30 minutes or so, so it’s not a huge commitment before you can switch to someone else’s playlist. And the usual auto-play and profile preferences are used if you just want curated streaming.

They just never reached critical mass and VC funding to go all on on fancy automation and pimping the shit out of it with gear partnerships like Pandora and Spotify did. So its kinda niche, like magnatune.com.

@chienfou Check out ScanCafe.com for digitizing photos and video. Get on their mailing list for regular sales on different services.

For hosting your media, look at Forever.com and their Forever Storage. Also watch the site for sales. It is permanent storage - not sorta-permanent (read the fine print of your cloud drive - it’s all “best effort” and “subject to change” and no guarantees. Forever also takes care of the “What happens to my pictures and video storage if I die?”.

Remember – all of the cloud companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) – treat your stuff as part of their contract with you, personally and individually, and there are no rights (to access, update, download, or remove) to access your account or any information you store that transfer to a beneficiary, spouse, kids, or relative.

It’s pricey, but it is permanent (your life +100 years). The best sales I’ve seen are 40% off.

I think the video streaming add-on is overpriced and don’t recommend it.

For managing the images and video, I use their Historian program to deal with media locally, then transfer to Forever

They also have some really cool tools for digital scrapbooks and amazing crafty stuff if you’re into it.

@f00l
Currently having an estate sale now that Mom and Dad have both passed away. Ran across several carousels of slides, 8 mm film, vhs, vhs-c, digital tape, unprocessed roll film, SD cards, compact flash cards… etc. Guess I can add those to the things I have the process of my own!