It has been a busy week, with the evenings filled with lots of odd and ends to take care of. Projects at work and some personal projects (including a website revamp and a piece I have ben trying to finish) have held my attention a bit in the evenings, and I will sometimes pop in a disc to rip, then forget about it.

One thing that is starting to slow the DAC project down is the old laptop that I am using to host and rip everything. It’s getting a little long in the tooth, and it is starting to show and it has had to work more this past year then it probably did over the three or four years before this one put together! It is an old PowerBook G4 (with the lid / monitor cracked off of it from a nasty fall at a cafe). It’s been a little 1 GHz work horse though… before the DAC project began, it served as a little web server for me and a few friends (which was fairly low traffic), so to suddenly be using its hard drive to rip CDs on a nightly basis (the original hard drive at that!) plus the CD drive has probably started to tax it some. Plus, it streams music to me quite a but now. There are over 1,000 CDs that the computer has ripped and now manages between iTunes here at home and Subsonic when I’m away. Over 300 GB of files are on the connected hard drive. In other words, for a machine that is 7 years old, it has done quite a bit since all this started in January. And the thing that is failing? I’m not positive, but I think something with the latest version of iTunes on it is weirding it out… I put CDs in, CDDB finds it, then iTunes kind of just drops it. I have to open Disc Utility to force an eject of the disc, then I pop it back in and it shows up just fine. This takes some time and attention where initially the ripping of CDs was rather mindless. The other thing that has slowed things down was the replacement of a 250 GB Firewire drive with a 1TB USB drive. The old computer only has USB 1, so things are just slower now.

Over the course of a few nights this week I finally finished up the Kronos Quartet box set, and also the last couple discs of the Dvorak symphonies set that Mira chose earlier in the week.

This afternoon Mira broke from her usual pattern and went for ‘pretty box!’ as she put it. She brought a CD of Emmanuel Nunes upstairs to me this afternoon and wanted to show me the ‘pretty box!’ and ‘hear pretty box music!’. After about two minutes of confusion, Celia finally turned to me and said ‘Daddy, this music is scary… do you LIKE this???’. The piece (‘Quodlibet’) for 6 percussionist, 28 instruments AND orchestra (weren’t the 28 instruments already an orchestra?) was a piece I looked at quite a bit while working on a doctoral exam topic on sound and space. Yes, I can see why to a five year old the music would seem scary, and it isn’t something I would normally put on for the girls. So I turned it off and and put on some Kylie Minogue (and there was much rejoicing).

After dinner, I went back downstairs with the girls to pick out more discs and Mira grabbed some Lutoslawski (which probably would have also bee scary) and Celia grabbed a stack of five innocent looking purple jewel cases that contained four discs of Messiaen’s organ music and a disc of music by Perotin and Leonin. Celia and I listened to the music from the early days of the Notre Dame Cathedral while reading about Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, and she loved it. I did too. I do find some enjoyment (and quite a bit of mental stimulation) from Nunes, Messiaen and Lutoslawski. And Lutoslawski and Messiaen have been highly influential in my work though… and I have lots more music from them to rip so I’ll have more opportunity to talk about both of them. But give me music from almost 1000 years ago, and my mind gets working on musical ideas for things that I am working on today, and I loved watching Celia relax into a book while listening to this music. It is nothing like what she encounters in her day to day life really, but it shows how something that has survived almost a millennium can still reach out to a five year old today.