Rip my entire CD collection

I’m a bit hesitant to do too much more for now because I might want to transition over to a format like Vorbis instead of or in addition to the flavor of MP3 I currently use, and need to do some research and testing. With CDs I often make minor adjustments to things like gain and lead-ins/outs that I don’t save like I do more major processing. I’m not too keen on doing it all twice.

Ripped some records recently, or rather a few top-priority tracks I should have done a long time ago. I need to find a whiz-bang way of cleaning records before doing any more. Using a “de-clicking” filter only gives moderate results at best, or causes bad distortion in places by “guessing wrong”. It’s better to avoid pops with a spotlessly-clean record to begin with.

...2002 remaster of Simple Minds: Once Upon A Time is listenable. The problem is the very beginning of “Oh Jungleland” (track 5) was messed with on this release, and I’d been putting off converting this CD because of it. Fixed now: I recorded the intact beginning from my original cassette, EQ’d/gain-changed/denoised it to match the sound of the remastered/tampered-with track off the 2002 CD, and edited it on. Sounds good now. :) Oh, and made stand-alone versions of “Sanctify Yourself” and “Come A Long Way”- those two songs are merged together slightly - plus a single track of the two combined. One of my absolute favorite albums, done finally and ready to go onto the “jukebox”-computer as essential “retro-active” tracks.

now that I put a hard drive (120GB) in a computer that had been given to me a while back and got it up and running. It’ll be nice to have all my MP3s accessible at once.
Latest converted: Jade: Jade To The Max, 5 tracks plus an edit I did of “Don’t Walk Away”: a version without the intro.

As an aside, it’s good to finally have a second computer—and it’s a few years newer than my main one (which itself is hopelessly behind the times but still does me very well) and will run some newer stuff my main one can’t, number-crunch faster and all that. Just gotta get them networked now.

ABBA: Gold, but finally got that one wrapped up and archived. All of that album needed re-equalizing (a 2dB boost around 200-500Hz and about 2dB above ~8KHz) and pre-editing to keep it from clipping (time-consuming). Sure sounds better now. The reason I do this is to get a more consistent sound from one album to the next: some older CDs are inconsistent in frequency response or need normalizing to give a more consistent level from one track to the next (depending on the nature of the album and tracks of course) and that often needs manually editing spurious spikes so they don’t clip. I recently did this same thing with The Cars: Greatest Hits too (originally “Shake It Up” gets progressively quieter in stages for some stupid reason, so I fixed that-sounds awesome now). BTW I archive these “remastered” tracks in FLAC format so I don’t have to do it over in the future. I know I have a least a few more CDs that’ll need The Treatment too…yay.

Last night I finished up If I Was: The Very Best Of Midge Ure & Ultravox and archived it to Gen_Coll_10, only to discover I had already done this album on Gen_Coll_5!!! Whoops! And I had done remastering work the last time as well. Oh well, I guess twice is twice as nice, and that nagging sense I had wasn’t deja vu after all. :-/ On the plus side, this time around I did enhancements to Band Aid: “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (this album is the best place to get this song short of the original 12” which I also have) and that can go in with my Christmas MP3s, a lot of which I’ll be redoing too.

convert every good song in my album collection to MP3. I have maybe 1000 done and archived on CD-ROM so far, and an estimated 3000-4000 left. CDs are easiest of course since they can be “ripped” and don’t need too much normalizing, re-equalizing, or other enhancements. I’m about 2/3 the way through those. The cassettes and LPs need to be recorded first of course, and also need more denoising and re-equalizing and stuff than the CDs. So quite a ways to go still.