tired of dealing with all the streaming service bullshit and the cloud service bullshit and the backups of backups of backups bullshit when it comes to our family's music collection
so today ive embarked on a journey
i will be re-ripping all of our CDs onto my old Mac Mini running iTunes 7 with no accounts connected, and importing them all as AACs, 320 KB/s 44,100 kHz. i wouldve done FLACs but iTunes doesnt support playback of em AFAICT, and this way im at least saving some more disk space. iTunes will handle the metadata for the songs via gracenote stuff, but it doesnt catch the album artwork. so to remedy that, at the same time while theyre ripping, im using xsane on my other linux compy to actually scan the physical album artwork for each CD and save those as higher quality images with decently(?) good compression and/or dithering if it doesn't look too bad (on a per-album basis). once ive done it all, i will transfer the scans over to the Mac and apply them to each album, checking song metadata while im at it to make sure it didnt get all messed up.
it sounds like a mess, but its actually very straightforward. put the cd in, automatically add to library. take sleeve and put it in the scanner, crop it. move onto next album. the only time i'll be doing the whole swap-usb-sticks-over dance will be at the end
i dont need to reminisce on a past where we used to do all this stuff. the next best time to realize my dreams is right now. and hey, maybe that goes for you too!
#physicalmedia #thejourneybegins #itunes #cdripping
