Yoesie - Music, Simply

The NEW iPod Experience

Eagerly you open the box to your new iPod/MP3 player; ahhh, there it is, all shiny and wonderful. It feels like something. It feels like you are on the cutting edge. It feels...pioneering. You slip it out of the cases or packaging and plug in the headphones and...NOTHING. It's empty.

AAAHHHHH Jeeeeesh. I guess I knew it was empty, but...I thought maybe there was something on it.

So you rush to your computer and install the software...download a song or quickly rip & encode a CD using iTunes or another piece of software...and...YIPPPEEE it works. Yeah. Cool.

I have one CD loaded. Now what?

Or, you may have purchased some songs from iTunes and then realized that you already own the music you're buying...on CD.

At which point you probably thought, "i'll just pop my CD's in and convert 'em myself". Then after about 20 CD's you may have realized that this is a very tedious process and takes a ton of time. Free CD RepairThen after 173 CD's (could that be a personal experience?...hmmmm) you realize that this is becoming a "serious project" and after reading a bit more information on the internet while your CD drive grinds away, that you're not archiving this new music. Which means...that you won't be able to change it when technology changes. Which also means that your spending all of this time and energy converting these CD's into a format that is not CD quality and won't be able to be transcoded to CD quality in the future?

UUUUUgggggggg.

So, if you don't do it now, you will have to convert those CD's sometime in the future to use with the new technology. Or, you buy all of your music again...at a future time, because anything you buy from iTunes or similar services now, is not CD or archival quality.

AAAAAHHHHHH Jeeeeeeeesh.

So, you've decided to start all over again because right now, "Im set up for it, an now I'm on a mission"...and you begin converting each CD's again, one by one: only this time ripping and encoding them to a Lossy version like MP3 and a Lossless version like FLAC.

About 27 CD's in, (hmmmmmm, again personal?) you're beginning to recognize a trend on your hard drive, Your files are not organizing themselves very neatly and some of the information is wrong. Some artist names are capitalized and some aren't, some are label first name first and some last name first. And when you test a song, there isn't any album art showing on your player like on all the commercials. You noticed it on the first go-around of '173', but thought "oh I'll fix it later." Now you remember reading something about...meta data and tagging...while learning about archiving during the '173 episode'.'

So you read some more as the CD drive grinds and you realize what is wrong with free meta data tagging information found on the internet.

It is inconsistent...at best...and you have to manually groom and organize it.

Aaaaaaaarrrrrrr.

OK, so now, you just wanna be done. This is getting ridiculous. You have downloaded yet another program because , through some trial and error, you've found the program you're using to convert the CD's is seriously lacking in functionality when it come to RE-Tagging and RE-Organizing all that meta data for each album. And then you realize that you may have to download another program to find the album art one album at a time.

Grrrrrr.....

This is turning into a monster project. CD's are in piles everywhere, the computer area is a mess and other people in the household are questioning just what the heck is going on...

"You said you would just pop em in and be done last week...hurry up already"

Or,

"Can I listen to it yet?"

But, the good news is, you are now set up to do it right...well pretty good anyway. Some songs pop and hiss, and some album art can't be found, but the names all look the same...it's pretty good.

It is now only taking you about 15 minutes a CD...158 CD's to Go...

HOLY COW...that is another 35 straight hours...without Stopping.

This is not very fun. I'm over it.

In reality, there is another couple of weeks of this stuff...because I have to go to work, and do my other life stuff.

Uuugg.

Sound Familiar?