It has been, it must be said, a total failure. Why? Because I’m lazy. And added to that problem I love music, and film, and so there are an enormous, and continuously growing number of disks. DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs; they keep arriving (at least sporadically), to say nothing of the Vinyl and the odd digital download.
The media horde is massive and unmanagable at present and despite my best intentions, or at least my occasionally adequate intentions, I’ve not managed to get more than a few disks ripped. Not aided by the fact that the poor old MacBook is starting to show its age (I just discovered today that 4k video is out of its league. I knew that the display couldn’t actually *display* it. That’s a given, it’s only 1280×800, a teeny bit short of the 3840×2160 that my OnePlus One will throw out as video. But I thought – as I often do – shoot in the best quality you can handle.
Turns out I can’t handle that.
Pity.)
Anyhow, so the great ripping project… Well first there was the issue of the randomly empty folders. Then there was the issue of the sometimes missing artwork. Then there was… get the idea? It all did not go well. On top of which there was the whole thing of: oh hey, Kate’s got to sit and enter all the track data because her chosen ripping software will only look at one flipping database, and it’s a crap database, but it’s the only application she can find that will output both FLAC and MP3; the MP3 only being required because iTunes is a honking steaming pile of donkey droppings. I mean, my 10 year old, discontinued, unsupported Logitech music players, they support FLAC and all sorts of random file formats, but iTunes? No.
Anyhow, rant over.
Then, to add insult to injury, you have to pay to join the database as someone who can enter track data, so all those disks I added, if I rip them again, I’ll have to re-enter that track-frigging-data. It has not been a rewarding experience.
But then, thanks to the joy of illness, I discovered this:
It is a 3D printable CD/DVD/Blu-Ray robot ripper. Give it a stack of CDs and off it goes. Now it doesn’t overcome some of the problems (namely the cover art / track name problems for the more eclectic bits of our collection); and it requires another Raspberry Pi to drive it… and a servo controller for the pi… but I’m pretty enthusiastic about it. Assuming our roof, when replaced, does not completely consume all of our money.
And it may overcome the tracknames / artwork problem because now, as I have a shiny new phone that is not my craptastic iphone 4 I don’t have to bother with keeping iTunes around as a main source of media management. (I’d be happier if DoubleTwist would talk MTP to the phone and if I could share podcasts twixt phone and Mac, because if anything makes me want to leave Apple at the moment it’s their irritating obstructiveness to anything that’s not Apple. I was aware of that when I got the MacBook, but back then the OS just worked, or at least, it did for me. These days it doesn’t seem to be that much more reliable than any other OS, and it’s taking more and more effort to keep it working… and because it’s pretty opaque about the way it does things (being as it’s meant to just work) it can be difficult to fathom what’s broken… and I daren’t let them install the shiny newest OS on my MacBook since their last OS update made my phone into a heap of junk, and every OS update has made my poor MacBook slower).
Anyhow, so that’s something for me to acquire the parts to build and get 3D printed…) and that’s also all my news.
Also, after 5 days of not being able to concentrate on reading long enough to manage more than a few sentences, I’m back sat upright, I even went outside willingly today (for a short walk – during which I decided rather rapidly that I’m really not nearly as well as I’d like to be). So, yay.
