The digital life

I made what I thought was a very sensible decision, namely that I was not going to purchase an iPod -- one of those tiny, portable computer hard drives from Apple Computer designed to hold a ton of digitized music, a higher-tech Walkman -- until I actually had a ton of digitized music. They advertise that those little buggers can hold 10,000 songs at a time, which sounds like a promising prospect: "Carry your whole CD collection with you all the time!"

Their promise, however, depends on making one of your own. Before you can experience this marvel of the digital age, you have to digitize, or "rip", the music from your compact discs into a format the computer can understand. This takes a lot of time, particularly if, like me, your music collection contains many more than 10,000 songs. In fact, it's nearer to 10,000 CDs.

OK, well perhaps that's an exaggeration. But my motley assortment of cast recordings, jazz, folk, country-western, a cappella, pop, rock, dance, cabaret and classical discs does number in the thousands. It's a bit embarrassing, sometimes. At parties, when the conversation turns to matters of money and investing, at my turn I just smile enigmatically and aver that my funds are all tied up in CDs.

But over the past few months, by a piecemeal process, I've undertaken the task of stripping all the little 1s and 0s off the discs and storing them in my computer, their native habitat. It's slow going, taking between five and ten minutes to process each album.

And, occasionally, I get pangs of doubt. In geek speak, I'm converting the CDs into a computer file format called MP3 which, you may recall, was all the rage a few years ago among teens and college students swapping music with the Napster application.

I was a late-comer to that party; lacking, for the longest time, a high-speed phone connection attached to my home computer, the prospect of downloading large music files was too daunting. It never even occurred to me that I could simply convert the many music discs I already owned. So MP3 remained a mystery to me and I was, quite frankly, reluctant to explore and embrace it.

Hell, when they were introduced, I refused for a long time even to buy a CD player until I got a signed affidavit from somebody promising they wouldn't come out with something better a week or two after I did. The milk crates packed with vinyl and a closet full of eight-track cassettes, dying and dead formats, in my student apartment already cruelly mocked me and, at the same time, labelled me a luddite.

So naturally I'm fretting that as soon as I finished ripping all of my CDs into the MP3 format, they'll invent something better the next day and render all my time spent feeding disc after disc into the computer obsolete.

The process has, however, yielded a few discoveries about my music collection, some happy, some perplexing, some worrying. For example, I was only slightly surprised to discover that there are a few dozen discs I purchased but never bothered to remove the plastic wrapping from, meaning they've never been heard in my home. There are a carton or two more that I received either as demos from groups I sought to book for one performance series or another, or review copies passed on to me during my tenure as a music critic for a major daily newspaper. Still others are extra copies boosted from the radio station where I DJed after high school.

And there's nothing like touching every album in your collection to expose odd gaps and even odder surfeits in my inventory. Cast albums, naturally, comprise perhaps the largest percentage chunk of the lot, but I've got a suspiciously lesbian number of Joni Mitchell albums. A bit earlier alphabetically, my Bette Midler collection is complete, but there are several missing Madonnas. And how I ended up with three copies of the perternaturally awful concept album for Starlight Express, I have no idea. (I suspect I was too drunk at too many white elephant exchanges in the 80s.)

Anyway, I've a few more albums to convert (and by "a few", I mean "at least 1,500") before I order that iPod. It's nice to have a goal and, heaven knows, I've got plenty to listen to while I pass the time.

"Heaven Knows." Hmmm...

Donna Summer, Robert Plant, or The Corrs? They're all here somewhere.

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