Rant #1,588: Digital Cleanup Time

The beginning of the year should remind everyone of a personal renewal, of a time to start over for something better.

Now that I have made that profound statement, let me get into the gist of what I am saying, which is not really that profound at all.

I have about 10,000 records, CDs and cassettes in my music collection (sorry, no 8-tracks, although my wife has them in her collection).

Most of them are situated in the extra bedroom we have, the room which was once my daughter's room but which she has no need for anymore--she is 27 years old and out on her own.

Anyway, most of my LPs are on shelves that line two sides of the room, unmanageable shelves which really aren't designed to hold LPs, but it is the best that we can do. Some of the LPs are on the floor near the very computer I am typing on.

My singles are in my daughter's old dresser and a couple of stand-alone sets of heavy plastic draws that I bought several years ago.

The cassettes are basically in the closet in the room or in various holders around the room; the CDs are scattered throughout the house in heavy plastic holders or are in shoe boxes in my daughter's old room.

So yes, when I say that my house is surrounded by music, I am telling you the truth.

In the basement, for the past few years I have kept all of my digital albums, gathered off the Internet via various sites. I picked these up mainly during a 10 year or so span when this was a popular exercise, and I have amassed probably about 5,000 to 6,000 albums this way.

They are contained on CD-Rs that I made myself, and they feature a vast array of music, from five albums to about 15 albums on each CD-R.

I made them for myself, for nobody else, and I did not distribute them to anyone once I got them.

I have them in various holders in the basement, including long plastic boxes, shoe boxes and cardboard containers.

This exercise of collecting albums digitally is pretty much over for me, unless I make up my own albums, which I still sometimes do, recording them off the actual vinyl record onto my computer via a USB-enabled turntable. But generally, most sites on the Internet no longer put up full albums, due to a variety of reasons--many of them legally based--so what I have is basically what I have.

I decided at the end of last year that I would get rid of the clutter of something around 800 CD-Rs collecting dust in my basement, and I would copy them over to an external hard drive that I have, which I bought during one of the times that my computer was on the fritz so that the concern fixing the computer would have a place to store my digital files that they were able to rescue.

So I hooked this external drive up to a second computer that I have--and old work computer that is a Mac--and that is how I spend some of my time on the weekend, transferring over these digital LPs to the drive.

Each CD-R takes from seven to 13 minutes each to transfer over--both music and images of the album cover--so it is no easy job. But right now, I have transferred over nearly 2,000 albums, so I am probably just at the real beginning of my goal.

Once the CD-R is transferred over, it gets dumped into a trash bag. I did keep about 100 or so jewel boxes, just in case I need them in the future, but I have dumped many more into the trash.

I figure that this whole process will take me several months. It is time consuming, I don't sit there the whole day doing it, and after a while, it does get tedious and boring.

But I look at what I have on MP3, coupled with my actual collection, and boy, I do really have something to be very proud of.

And digitally alone, I have a cornucopia of stuff, everything right now from the 5th Dimension to the Zombies--much like my own vinyl/cassette/CD collection, with everything in between.

When I read off what I am transferring over, I am like a kid in a candy shop, proud that I was able to nab these things digitally--some of the LPs I have in my actual collection, but a lot of this stuff I only have in the digital format.

Just this past Sunday, I brought up another box full of this stuff, and I am eager to get started.

To give you an idea of what I have on these disks, let me pull a random disk for you and tell you what I am going to be transferring over this weekend:

Billboard Top 100: 1962
Billboard Top 100: 1963
Police: Certifiable
Willie and the Red Rubber Band: We're Coming Up

This is on disk No. 441. I don't even know what this stuff is or why I copied it over, but at the time, it was important to me.

The Billboard disks are probably what they say they are, 100-disk compilations of the top songs of the respective year. The Police entry is intriguing. It must be a greatest hits collection that I copied from some site. The Wille one, I truly have I have no idea what it is, but I will find out this weekend.

Anyway, when I get done with this, at least some of the clutter in the basement will be eradicated, and that is my goal.

So let me continue doing what I am doing, and think of me as I push to 5,000, 6,000, or whatever the number is of LPs that I will be transferring over to that hard drive.

My only fear: that the hard drive won't be able to hold everything I have, and then I will still have some clutter.

Time will tell. Let's see what happens.