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Drive (hard)
Mar. 17th, 2004 09:25 amI allowed myself exactly one impulse purchase out of my tax return this year, which was an external hard drive, to make up for the puny li'l thing that came with Muckle John, my trusted iMac. I justified the purchase under the alibi that I'd need more storage eventually, but the truth is that I wanted to get my entire CD collection into MP3 format, and now, dammit, because it'll make mix-making that much easier.
I should've known there was going to be trouble very early on, when literally one-and-a-half hours after I paid for my used drive on eBay, I spotted the exact same drive new for $30 less at Staples. (That banging sound some of you may have heard was me applying my forehead to some metal shelving.) Oh, well, I thought, it'll still be worth it. I'll just hook the puppy up, bump all my existing music files over to it, tell iTunes where I put them, and voilá!
Ahem, yes, well. Evidently the French government, unbeknownst to me, must have at some point changed the definition of "voilá" to mean, "F*#!ing piece of...GAHHH!" Because you see, when you bump over files like that, it copies rather than moves them, which I'd amticipated. What I had not anticipated was that changing the folder location in iTunes' preferences does not mean that iTunes will suddenly acknowledge the new copies, much in the same way that marrying a second time does not mean that Grandma will acknowledge your new husband. No matter: iTunes does allow you to tell the system where a music file has been moved to.
One song at a time.
And I had nearly 600 MP3's at that point.
Kill me now.
Long and short of it, it only took a handful of hours to fix it, and now I'm merrily ripping CD after CD onto Ye Olde Pain in Ye Arse hard drive. Soon I'll be able to assemble and burn a mix for anyone in minutes, a process that used to take hours. It'll be easy as pie.
*sigh* Am I absolutely nuts for missing the old way?
I mean, mix-making under the old system was truly a labor of love. It was a full-afternoon project; if you said to your friend, "I'm going to make you a mix," they'd know that a great deal of time and effort was expended to make them this gift. Besides that, recording mixes on tape is a much more organic process: you pop open the case, give the wheels a few twists to get past the leader, start recording your first song, and while that's playing you kneel in front of your CD collection, listening to the current track and trying to decide what the perfect follow-up would be. It was a nasty amount of work, but by gods, it was fun.
As it is, I'm devoting far, far more time into converting my CDs into the proper format than I ever did slamming out cassettes for my friends. And once it's done, I'll embrace the process with open arms, and start making all of those obscure theme collections I've been plotting for ages, and finally getting caught up on all the music I owe people. But it's not the same. Not the same at all.
I should've known there was going to be trouble very early on, when literally one-and-a-half hours after I paid for my used drive on eBay, I spotted the exact same drive new for $30 less at Staples. (That banging sound some of you may have heard was me applying my forehead to some metal shelving.) Oh, well, I thought, it'll still be worth it. I'll just hook the puppy up, bump all my existing music files over to it, tell iTunes where I put them, and voilá!
Ahem, yes, well. Evidently the French government, unbeknownst to me, must have at some point changed the definition of "voilá" to mean, "F*#!ing piece of...GAHHH!" Because you see, when you bump over files like that, it copies rather than moves them, which I'd amticipated. What I had not anticipated was that changing the folder location in iTunes' preferences does not mean that iTunes will suddenly acknowledge the new copies, much in the same way that marrying a second time does not mean that Grandma will acknowledge your new husband. No matter: iTunes does allow you to tell the system where a music file has been moved to.
One song at a time.
And I had nearly 600 MP3's at that point.
Kill me now.
Long and short of it, it only took a handful of hours to fix it, and now I'm merrily ripping CD after CD onto Ye Olde Pain in Ye Arse hard drive. Soon I'll be able to assemble and burn a mix for anyone in minutes, a process that used to take hours. It'll be easy as pie.
*sigh* Am I absolutely nuts for missing the old way?
I mean, mix-making under the old system was truly a labor of love. It was a full-afternoon project; if you said to your friend, "I'm going to make you a mix," they'd know that a great deal of time and effort was expended to make them this gift. Besides that, recording mixes on tape is a much more organic process: you pop open the case, give the wheels a few twists to get past the leader, start recording your first song, and while that's playing you kneel in front of your CD collection, listening to the current track and trying to decide what the perfect follow-up would be. It was a nasty amount of work, but by gods, it was fun.
As it is, I'm devoting far, far more time into converting my CDs into the proper format than I ever did slamming out cassettes for my friends. And once it's done, I'll embrace the process with open arms, and start making all of those obscure theme collections I've been plotting for ages, and finally getting caught up on all the music I owe people. But it's not the same. Not the same at all.
