This post is, I guess as I've typed more of it, a bit of a moan on how difficult
it is to get old digital music formats to work with each other 😯 And how you
can shoot yourself in the foot by not realising the consequences of decisions
you make...
I bought a portable Minidisc recorder in 2000 which I used to
transfer a lot of my CDs to - was great - had it plugged into my CD separate via
an optical lead and I could put 2 CDs on one disc. Then play them on the player
that fitted in my shirt pocket and played for 50 hours on one AA alkaline
battery 😊 Unlike the portable CD player that was just too big for most pockets
and despite having anti-shock still skipped tracks when I made a sudden movement☹️☹️☹️
But then I won an iPod mini 4GB in a Walkers Crisps promotion in 2005 and the
Minidisc Walkman (it actually is a Sony one) went into storage. I've had a 2nd
hand iPod Classic 160GB for about 8 years and it holds all my music and plays for
about 50 hours on one charge. However, it has one big disadvantage - finding
particular albums or tracks in the 20,000 tracks sitting on it.
So, I thought
about it for a while and 2 years ago via several ebay purchases (Recorder, Charging dock and mains supply, USB cable) I got a newer
Minidisc recorder (for a total spend of about £60-70) that connects to my old
Windows laptop a couple of year ago. I'd be able to put 2 albums on each
Minidisc and find them easier and I have about 40 Minidiscs 7 of which never
used and still in the cellophane wrapper and Minidiscs don't degrade with use
and reuse like tape did. So, a great solution -- no because you couldn't get
Sony's equivalent to iTunes (Sonic Stage) for anything newer than Windows XP and
my old laptop has Windows 7 😕
Recently, through many support forums, I managed
to download a patched version of Sonic Stage that worked on Windows 7 and the Windows 7 drivers for the Minidisc recorder. I then discovered that I had very
few tracks in a compatible format that Sonic Stage could transfer to minidisc 💽
OK, I'll convert a copy of all my iTunes music back to a format that Sonic Stage
likes. More forum searches and trying various free downloads before then I
finally discovered that iTunes can do it for me. Cue more searching to get it to
do it as the menus to do it weren't visible - you have to change the format it
rips CDs to before you get to see the menus that convert existing tracks in the
iTunes library. So, I set it to convert all 20,000 tracks -- it took 3 days of
waiting to convert them all 😯
Great! I can transfer an album to Minidisc - errr
no, as there were many duplicate tracks and you can't tell which are the best
quality. You know how your digital music grows? Some tracks you downloaded from
Napster back in 2000 as poor quality mp3s then when you get an iPod you rip them
from CDs or you download them digitally or you "forgot" to delete a copy you
made of a friend's music when you transferred it off to an external drive when
you were rebuilding their PC ten years ago or when you got a 2nd hand iPod and
bought a program to transfer its music to the computer before you reset it. The
ways we accumulate digital music are numerous and iTunes kindly grabs it all for
you.
Cue another search for software to remove duplicates but it only works for
filenames where the name and size are the same. So, I'll have to do my own
coding in VBA in Excel -- I can do that -- I just need to adapt the code I have
already written that scans a directory hierarchy and lists its contents in a
spreadsheet to compare filesizes and filenames.
That was about a month ago and I
just haven't been in the mood to do the hard thinking to work out the logic of
the filenames as to which one I keep. Some digital music I have acquired wasn't
originally ripped by iTunes so uses different naming conventions for the tracks
-- different track numbering especially with double albums.
Maybe today is the
day to think out the logic and do the coding? Then I can have the new one with
its shagged-out rechargable battery in its main dock attached to my micro system
in my bedroom and my still perfectly working older one for when the Welsh
government eases lockdown and lets us get out and about for more than 5 mile
journeys and when it's safe to use public transport again.
