DIGITAL TO ANALOG CONVERSION, getting the bits to my speakers
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Day 1. ABBA, Air, Elliott Smith, The Smiths, Mozart and R.E.M.

Posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 6:43 am in Celia, Classical, Mira, Rock / Pop, Tamiko by josh

I want to avoid going through my whole collection and ripping the CDs in the order they are stored on my bookshelves. This does make packing the discs away a little tricky after I rip them, but it also gives me a wonderful randomness to this whole process. To make things a little more random, I went into the extra bedroom this morning at asked Celia and Mira to pull a few discs off the shelves. Celia went for some red spines (ABBA and Air), and Mira just went to the shelves and started to pull discs down. Whether or not Mira did this in response to my request isn’t known – this is what Mira does when she is around the CD shelves. Today, Mira grabbed off the The Smiths and Elliott Smith. R.E.M.’s ‘Automatic For The People’ was just above those and fell down with the ‘Smiths’, and I also grabbed ‘Marriage Of Figaro’.

I got ABBA for Tamiko some time ago (a download that I burned to disc), and I admit they are quite a guilty pleasure. It’s hard not to have fun when ABBA is playing. I remember listening to ABBA in spanish class in high school (ABBA Oro), and I love to hear Tamiko sing along with them. Celia loves to dance to them (and she loves to dance to Kylie Minogue, who I am sure would not be who she is without ABBA). And as Mira gets her feet under her, I imagine she’ll enjoy them too. What a stark contrast their music is to Elliott Smith’s. The two discs I ripped today were his first album (fairly dark, just Elliott and his guitar) and ‘From A Basement On A Hill’ (released after his suicide). His first album is a wonderful, moody record, and in hindsight probably hints at what will happen in his future. ‘From A Basement On A Hill’ is simply to sad for me to listen to. I have never even listened to the whole thing. When I first bought it, I got about halfway through it before I turned it off. It was just too sad for me at the time, and I have never brought myself to listen to the whole thing. The unfinished quality of what I remember hearing was quite fitting.

The Smith’s ‘The Queen Is Dead’ and R.E.M.’s ‘Automatic for the People’ both bring along lots of high school memories. Heavier on the R.E.M. side though. Not that I don’t appreciate The Smiths, but I was always more of an R.E.M. fan. And while I really got into R.E.M. with ‘Document’ and ‘Green’, ‘Automatic For The People’ was one of my favorite albums of theirs at the time it came out. I understand why it didn’t catch the ears of a lot of other R.E.M. fans, but the more acoustic, orchestrated feel of this album spoke to me at the time. A couple of weeks ago ‘Monty Got A Raw Deal’ was featured in an NPR interview about songs and game shows. And hearing only 30 seconds of the song left me wanting to hear the whole album again. ‘Man On The Moon’ doesn’t stand up as well for me now (a casualty of radio overplay) but ‘Try Not To Breathe’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’ strike me as even more amazing the I remember. And the strings in ‘Drive’ still sound unexpected to me… fresh and dark at the same time.

‘Marriage Of Figaro’ is one of my favorite operas. But over the past couple of years, I have started to feel it is just wrong to only listen to opera. It is such a visual and dramatic medium that so much is lost when you only hear it. A couple years ago I thought I would eventually want to replace all my opera recordings with DVDs, but when I finished transferring the disc today I played a few tracks (as part of my streaming test). And it is so amazing to hear this music. Sure, the visuals and staging are missing, but a Mozart aria has no problem standing on its own. The recording is a live one (with John Eliot Gardiner conducting, Bryn Terfel and Alison Hagley). I watched the video a couple of times during shifts in the video store at Tower, and it is an amazing performance. Gardiner shapes an amazing performance, and the sound quality is stunning. I look forward to listening to the whole thing again very soon.

Digital to Analog Conversion.

Posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 10:53 pm in DAC Project by josh

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.