iPoddie

Our economic stimulus money arrived.  Ironically, I'll be spending the vast majority of it in Ireland.

 

However, one thing I did finally buy was an iPod.  The classic version with "only" 80 gigs of memory.  Since I don't download songs indiscriminantly, my music library will take up only a tiny bit of that 80 gigs, and I won't be keeping large numbers of downloaded videos on it, either, so why fork out the extra $100 for 160 gigs?

 

Anyway, I got it home and spent most of Saturday converting all my WMA music files to MP3 files so the iPod could read them.  This took quite a long time for both my desktop and my laptop.  Then I had to recreate my Windows Media Player playlists on iTunes, the program that runs the iPod on the computer, and tell it to copy and synchronize everything to the iPod.  Whew!

 

But now my entire musical library is on my iPod, and I don't need to bring music CDs in the car anymore.  Yay!

 

I like the iPod, really.  Easy to use, lots of memory.  It holds all my electronic photos, too, so I can show off pictures of the boys at a moment's notice.  :)

The Audacity!

I've found an open-source computer program called Audacity.  It allows you to record various types of sounds straight to your computer and play with them.  One of its nicer functions is that you can hook your computer to a stereo, play a tape, and Audacity will record the whole thing.  Then you can cut the tape into sections, turn each section into an MP3 file (complete with track label, artist, album, genre, and year), and save it on its own.

 

I'm thrilled!  I have a whole mess of tapes that went out of print before CDs were invented, and I've been wondering how to preserve them.  One of my favorite harp albums is on tape, but I have no easy way to listen to it these days.  I spent a chunk of the evening recording it to my laptop, converting it, cutting it, and naming it.  Poof!  Instant electronic album!  It's now on both my computers and my iPod.  It's not perfect.  I cut some tracks a little too closely and one track somehow got misnamed.  I'm hoping there's a way to edit out the hissing noise you get with tapes.  But it works!

 

This is so cool.