03 December 2012

Where to?

We had a cold weekend and we're having a rainy Monday. The sun came out yesterday afternoon, though, and it was even bright enough for me to take a few photos between five and six p.m.

A jet zooming over vineyards and woods...

...headed where, I wonder. Would I want to go there?

I'm spending a few hours every day digitizing our collection of music CDs. There must be 500 or 600 over them, which we've acquired over the past 30 years. Half are American, and half French. It's a good way to stay busy on these winter days, which are either too gray or too cold for doing anything outdoors. It's funny, though, because I listen to a lot less music than I used to.

11 comments:

  1. Wow, that's a lot of music. I feel like I listen to the same 5-10 CDs every year-- I want to like something new!

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  2. I listened to Patricia Kaas this weekend. Such a gorgeous voice.

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  3. Judy, it is a lot of music. I'm only about a quarter of the way through.

    Nadege, Patricia Kaas has a new album of Piaf songs out. I saw her (and heard her sing) on Drucker's Vivement Dimanche a week or two ago.

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  4. You may remember Ken, we did the same to our 1500 CDs - Twice!!!!!
    The second time it was to a mobile hard drive formatted to Apple/Mac so we can take our collection to where ever we travel.

    Its all on iTunes and can be played by artist, album or randomly. Patricia Kaas other than Piaf was the 1st French singer that we collected. Think we may have 5 of her CDs.

    Good luck on your project - you won't regret the hard work.

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  5. Did you take the top photo at the same time Walt took his?

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  6. Ken, I've started to put our vinyl onto the iPod via a special record deck linked to the computer... fine, as long as you don't get tempted down the remove the scratches route... takes ages and kills the sound if you do it automatically. I now only cut out the clicks and leave the record as is... all our CDs are already on there... 25 days worth... yes, well... random is nice!! Except for the classical tracks... a bit of a symphony followed by ZedZed Pinnacle doesn't work unless the classical bit was something heavy in its own right.

    I still haven't got round to trying out the Archos and the memory card... when I have time, Pauline's usually listening to it! Well that's my excuse. Soundwise, I think the little beastie is excellent... I would love to know how modern speaker technology can make a room width spread of sound from a pair of speakers an inch across and four and a half inches apart!?

    If you really want to know where that plane is heading/leaving... Simon put up a link to a Google [I think] service that maps the flights, realtime, and a click on the plane brings up allm the flight details... great fun for about fifteen minutes... then you might as well go and watch paint dry!

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  7. Starman, I probably took my photo a few minutes after Walt took his. We have planes flying over all the time. We see them but don't hear them.

    Leon, twice? Couldn't you just copy the first set of songs and albums to a new drive? That would be a lot less work. I'm using iTunes as well.

    Tim, the Archos radio's speakers are amazing. You know, don't you, that you can play your music collection through it? You have to get the network configuration set up right.

    It was 12 or 15 years ago when I re-recorded some of my vinyl albums onto CDs. What a time-consuming venture! Finally, I ended up buying CDs of most of the old LPs I had. And then I got rid of all the LPs and sold the turntable when we moved to France ten years ago.

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  8. As much as I'd like to play the music from the "Brain" through the Archos or this laptop... neither are connected to the network... the Livebox doesn't allow a proper network setup and the wifi on the Linksys that makes the net is too poor to reach either machine... but it was a cheap solution to the problem. But the iPod connects into the Hi-fi system without any problem...

    And as for time consuming... yes! But nice to listen to those tracks again in the old fashioned way. In fact, I am going to try and use the deck to record onto a CD in the CD Recorder-Player and use that method to get them into my machine... then both of us can listen to the music whilst it is being played... not just me in my office with all the other equipment.

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  9. My next corvée is to digitise a few hundred 78s.....

    (Actually I've found a way of at least reducing the hiss, though it's not automatic, it involves fiddling around with various features in Audacity. I'm not really quite sure what all the technical terms mean but there's a marked improvement).

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  10. Ken,
    Something to do with Mac/PC formatted hard drives and sound files which I don't quite understand.
    Anyway, all done now.

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