Using the ipod

The ipod - what a great little invention it is. I am thinking of going shopping for a proper connector kit so that I can put ours in the car. It will replace the 6 CD stacker. Hooray - no more changing CD's halfway through a trip to Melbourne.

Just one problem - importing all the bloody CD's into the computer first. Yes, it only takes a few minutes per CD, but we have about a cubic metre of CD's. I have spent the last few days importing CD's, which means sticking one in, walking off to do something, wandering past a bit later, swapping it over etc etc.

Then at the end of the day, taking away the pile that has been imported and coming back with another stack. It will all be worth it in the end.

This is the second time I have done this.

With my old PC, I imported all my CD's using RealPlayer. RealPlayer however saves the tunes as WM3 or some wierd format, and iTunes doesn't recognise them. The only way to get my entire library into iTunes was to either re-import it, or use a converter to convert the lot fom WM3 to something that iTunes would recognise.

I found a neat bit of shareware that did it, but it managed to garble about half my library in the process. I put up with that - because of the way it garbled it, it would have meant re-importing the whole lot again anyway, as I would have had to sort through the libary album by album trying to work out what was garbled. Bloody nuisance. But half a library is better than none at all, and it beats rebuilding the entire thing again. Hell, I have about 6 days of music saved up - what does it matter if you chop that down to three?

When I got a new PC, I didn't bother transferring the library over. I just started again from scratch.

The horror, the horror.

This time though, I have been selective. There are some CD's that came out of storage, were given a quick glance and then put straight back in again. I should have just thrown them in the bin. I reckon I could cull at least 5% of my collection right now without thinking too hard about it.

We need the space. I should just do it.