iPods revisited

iPods can be a lot of work! Sure they're fun to listen to and even show off your grandchildren with but they take a lot of work setting them up. As of now, we have uploaded into our computer (and subsequently downloaded into our iPods) 4,615 songs/tunes, in 318 albums, representing 11 days of continuous listening material, and taking up 14.4 gigabytes of our computer storage.

There's a special (free) program that we use to read, store, and index our music so it can be downloaded into the iPods. That program is iTunes. As those of you who have undertaken this process know, CDs are like CD-ROMs in that they can be read much faster than a regular music CD player plays. This is in the order of 6 to 16 times as fast, on our computer at least. That means that a 48 minute CD can be read and interpreted in something between 3 and 8 minutes. Not only that but there is a gigantic database of CDs that iTunes accesses to get the track information. The iTunes program and the iPod Classic also let you store the CD "cover artwork" (picture of the cover) with the uploaded music. A smaller database of this cover art exists for some, but certainly not as many, CDs as the tracklist. The bottom line is that it takes 10 to 15 minutes per CD to get it from the CD rack, into the computer, and back into place.

Yesterday marked a kind of turning point with the iPod music project as we pretty much finished up our CD collection and began on our cassette tape collection. I had previously taken most of our good quality reel to reel tapes and converted them to CD's so they're already in the computer. Tapes, either reel to reel or cassette, can only be converted to computer storage in "real time" plus editing and processing. So the minimum time a 48 minute tape can take is 48 minutes. And that's assuming the interpreting software can tell exactly where the "spaces" are between songs. Usually, I've had to do some "tweaking" to get the tracks to line up with the directory. Also, iTunes won't use the track identification database unless the music is coming in from CD. That means I have to manually enter all the track data.

This all means two things - one, we're going to be more careful about which cassettes get into the system; and two, the project is going to be going much slower from now on. I'll probably set a goal of 1 or 2 tapes per day. We've also found that life has been hard on some of our tapes. The sound quality just isn't like it was the first day we played them.