At long last, I’ve MP3d all of my CDs here in Blacksburg. At least, all of the tracks on each of my CDs to which I listen. For a long time, I’ve had perhaps a quarter of my listening library MP3d, and I consequently failed to listen to a large portion of my music collection. (I have hundreds of CDs that I own as collectors’ items, or that I’m simply not interested in listening to at this point in my life.) That’s a total of 257 artists and 9.7GB of audio from CDs. From some artists (Peter Griesar, Paul Simon, Soul Coughing, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash, etc.) I wanted everything, but from many others (Moby, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, Gus Gus, Space, Gorillaz, OMC, etc.), I’d purchased their album for just a track or two. I only listen to music on my computer (which serves as my stereo system) and on my iPod, so I just can’t see what point there is to keeping CDs around. I’d thought that the process of ripping them all would take a while, but this G4 pulls the audio off at around 15x play speed, so an hour-long CD takes just 4 minutes. By keeping them all on my file server, I can listen to music anywhere in my apartment with my iBook, what with my high-speed WiFi cloud.
Now I just have to take these boxes of CDs to my folks’ house to store there, and MP3 the hundred-odd CDs that I have there.