Thanks to yet another rousing stretch of insomnia over the weekend, I hit the home stretch in my CD-to-MP3 conversion project. So hooray for me.<\/p>\n

The good news is, I’m almost finished. I began over a year ago with a pile of 1,200 CDs, and I’m finally down to the last 100. The end is in sight. Despite having so many CDs, I couldn’t tell you the last time I opened or listened to a physical disc. Whether we’re in the house or in the car, we pretty much listen to mp3s at this point. Things change.<\/p>\n

The bad news is, I’m down to the absolute dregs of my collection. We’re talking disco compilations, spooky Halloween sounds from the dollar bin, John Williams’ greatest themes conducted by people other than John Williams, World’s Greatest Thunderstorms, and so forth. Plus, I have CDs from dozens of bands you’ve never heard of, a few of which came from countries you’ve never heard of. For a couple of years I wrote music reviews for other people’s websites and for a couple of years I ran my own review site, but long after I closed up shop bands and record labels continued to mail me their CDs to review. Some of the CDs I’m ripping to mp3 right now I’m literally opening for the first time. I may never listen to them, but I’m ripping them all to mp3 anyway. Why? Because everything is everything, and done is done. When I’m finished, there will be no question as to whether or not something was ripped. It’ll make me feel better.<\/p>\n

The worse news is, I’ve found around 40 CDs in my collection that are completely unplayable. They’re not scratched or visually damaged, they just don’t play anymore. A few of these are promo CDs that were mailed to me, but most of them are ones I bought in retail stores several years ago. Some of them are things I’ve been able to find in mp3 format on the Internet, but many of them are less popular discs that I haven’t been able to find rips of. (Sue me for downloading mp3 rips of CDs I paid money for that rotted, I dare you.) I haven’t done a ton of testing on these discs yet — perhaps a different drive on a different machine might be able to read them, a theory I plan to test before giving up on them. Still, it’s a little scary thinking that so many of these discs went so bad so quickly. Perhaps that was the source of my insomnia …<\/p>\n

No plans yet on what to do with all these physical CDs. I’ve checked into a few websites that accept used CDs — some pay cash, others trade for merchandise. For the time being I may just box them all up and stick them out in the garage. Baby steps, and all that. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to yet another rousing stretch of insomnia over the weekend, I hit the home stretch in my CD-to-MP3 conversion project. So hooray for me. The good news is, I’m almost finished. I began over a year ago with a pile of 1,200 CDs, and I’m finally down to the last 100. The end is in sight. Despite having so many CDs, I couldn’t tell you the last time I opened or listened to a physical disc. Whether we’re in the house or in the car, we pretty much listen to mp3s at this point. Things change. The bad news… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}