I’m listening to Steve Miller, the Kinks, the Who, even the Doors,
fer cris’sake.
Driving around with an “End This War” sticker on the back of my car.
Has dud lost his mind? Is he wearing bell bottoms too? Well, no,
though I still have my long (grey) hair and wire rim glasses.
The “End This War” sticker is courtesy moveon.org. The net has done
so much for activism, it is truly a wonderful thing.
And the 60’s music? Well … I never threw my records out. Nor
my turntable — the first really good one I bought in college (A
Dual 1019 for you equipment buffs). I’ve got quite a few records,
actually, probably a thousand of them. I missed playing them, but
really, who has the time anymore to put on a record, and actually
sit down and listen to it for twenty minutes, and then get up
to flip the record over. Sooooo twentieth century, that. I’d
rather let my computer/media center play my music all day as I work
in my home office.
I’d ripped all my CDs a long time ago, so I already have quite a
bit of music available to the “media center” computer. But still, I
missed my records. I knew from listening to random tracks from my
CD collection that nice moment of “wow, I haven’t heard that in
a while”.
So I’ve been “ripping” my LP collection. If I can find a re-release
of one of my LPs on CD in a bargain bin, I’ll buy it, because ripping
a CD is so much easier than ripping an LP. But some of this stuff
is not going to be re-issued, ever. And I’m not paying $20 for a
CD just to avoid ripping the LP. So I just picked up this wonderful
new toy: the iKEY, that is a little tiny computer you hook between
a turntable and a USB “key” (flash drive) and then the iKEY will
record what comes out of the turntable on the flash drive as either
a wav file or an mp3 file. And unlike using my computer to rip
records, there’s almost no hum or other interference in the recording.
Those old recordings are as good as ever. Most of them still hold up,
even 40 years later.
Sorta like me, I guess.
dud