Digital Music Woes

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.