ripping good time

The other day I was ordering a was browsing Amazon for a couple of CDs (yes, I still buy CDs! How very old school of me!) when it occurred to me I hadn't mentioned the completing of a grand project.

A lot of this time this blog is all about how rubbish I am at completing or doing stuff. I'm supposed to be an anime fan, but I can't be bothered watching all my anime DVDs. I'm supposed to be buying the anime mags so I can scan them, but can't be arsed. I'm supposed to enjoy reading, but instead of reading the books I buy, I read manga instead. I'm supposed to be a gamer, but fixate on 1 game and play that to the exclusion of all others. And all the other stuff.

Well, the project in question was also a bit of a victim of this effect to. The project in question was the ripping of all of my CD collection to MP3.

I used to be really into music, but when after Uni I kinda rediscovered anime and manga and what gave way was my interest in music. Plus, at the time the bands I was most into had all either broken up or had started releasing crap.

What I'm saying is that my music collection used to be huge, given the amount of time I'd been building it, but since Uni I've hardly bought anything, so I guess now it's just big.

Anyway, the idea was that given the MP3 player I got for my thirtieth I should start ripping my CDs. I started on this and got a long way, but then I hit a problem.

The ripping program I was using has a database that looks up the album and track titles and it covered 95% of my CDs. Admittedly it wasn't perfect - some of the album names especially are a bit wonky - but it was good enough.

But then I found that some of my CDs weren't in there. And I also found that tying the stuff in was horribly tortuous. So I put these to the side and did the rest. There weren't many, but enough that once I'd completed the others I kept making excuse to not do them.

Well recently I made the time and ripped them plus the few newer CDs I'd bought since putting the project on hold. Now, interestingly and technically, I also found about half a dozen disks that had some sort of copy protection on them, so I've not ripped them, but I'm pretty happy to say that I've completed the project.

It's kinda a good feeling to really finish something.