I thought accessing the new library while away from home was going to be one of the trickier parts in this whole process. Some quick poking around last night and I found Simplify Media. Took only a couple minutes to set up, and I have R.E.M. playing from the library at home (while I am on the train with iffy Wi-Fi to Seattle). It compresses the sound on the fly down to a 160 kb MP3 stream … not great, but not bad either. I’m curious if the quality will be better when I have a stronger internet connection.
Playlists are one thing I notice as a bit of a problem at the moment. I’m organizing the discs into playlists that are stored inside playlist folders on iTunes. For example, ‘Automatic For The People’ is stored in Playlists->Rock / Pop->R.E.M.->Automatic For The People. But Simplify Media just shows a flattened list (no nesting). As the library grows, this will be more and more of a problem, but this isn’t bad at all for the first app I tried for doing this.

In the strictest sense, anytime we play music in digital form (CD, MP3, etc.) it needs to go through the process of being converted back into an analog signal that our speakers / headphones can handle. What I have been listening to lately has been more and more dictated by what is on my computer, and I realized that the CDs in the extra bedroom have become long-term storage rather then an active collection. For the most part, the purchasing of actual discs is probably more a part of my past then my future… This really is for the best. I am no longer afforded great discounts (or free music for that matter) and I have think I have settled my internal debate about whether or not the extra expense and space needed for CDs is worth it. I am quite happy using eMusic, and it is actually easier to find the music I am looking for there then in the typical record store here in the northwest.

Then, I went to play a disc the other day and I discovered that my CD player was unplugged. It probably came unplugged a couple weeks ago when I was getting rid of my failed attempt to wire the TV for digital (antenna, converter, etc.), but it also showed me that I mostly don’t listen to my CDs much anymore. If I want to hear something, I rip it onto my computer to have it with me, plug the computer into speakers at home or work and listen to it that way. So I have decided it is time… for the price of two IKEA bookshelves I can get a couple of large hard drives. And in a way, I also get my music back. Eventually I will even have access to it when I’m away… so here is what I have set-up so far:

1) old PowerBook G4 (our old server) updated to OS X 10.5.8, iTunes 9. Drop a disc in, and it auto-rips the CD to Apples Lossless.

2) two FireWire drives (to start) that we had laying around… about 350 GB total.

3) the above is wired into our router with Ethernet.

So far the streaming to the other computers seems to work just fine. But I can already imagine the problems coming up with the current combination. Old computer for one, old drives for another. I will (rather soon) need to get a newer larger drive, but also need to plan for back-ups (the last thing I want to do is re-rip all this). Then – the shear amount of time. Probably a couple of years doing a few discs a day?

And while the above sounds like work I’m really looking forward to the whole thing. This is a chance to go through my whole collection again – well over 20 years worth of CD collecting – and to think about how all of this has contributed to my life so far. When I talked to Tamiko about this idea (and when I have brought it up in the past) there have been aspects of all this that has saddened both of us a bit. We have had shelves of CDs as a large part of our space / decor ever since we have moved in together. A house without visible CDs will be a change.

I’m looking forward to hearing (and having easier access to) all of this material again. In some ways it is like downloading all of these as album, and Celia and Mira get to hear music that has sat on shelves (much of it untouched for years). In short, now that I’m starting this, I’m pretty excited. I’ll use this as a space to keep track of what I pull off disc – the good, the bad and the ugly. And will share a bit about what all of this music means to me.