Beautiful Music my ass

It's been a project a few months in the making and (combined with being in front of a computer about 8 hours a day at work already) a large reason of my dropoff in blog content, but I can finally say I have made some progress on the vinyl to digital conversion.

I can officially put Barry Manilow Live in the done pile and move on to something I actually enjoy. After two straight days of hearing him, I feel like I deserve it.

I remember casually talking to a certain chemistry teacher in high school about the possibility of doing something like this. Knowing that I dabbled in audio engineering at school, he asked me about how complicated it would be to transfer albums to CD. I believe at the time I said I couldn't imagine it being much harder than plugging the "out" of the record player into a line in and using something like Audacity (a wonderful free program, by the way) to record it digitally.

Well, I was half right. Turns out 99% of record players need to have a separate pre-amp to get any kind of clean sound out of them. After a quick google search I came across this bad boy and as of yet have absolutely no complaints. It works exactly as it should. /shameless plug

Moving onward. Once I was getting sound into the computer I dabbled within my slightly more complicated sound editing program to get a layout that would be best suited for this venture, as opposed to, you know, recording a band. After getting all my EQs and other plugins tuned, then it was a simple hit record type of process that I initially thought it would be.

So overall, more complicated than I first thought, but still not too terrible. And yes, I know that there are USB record players out there now that basically take away the need for all this fancy shmancy doo-hickie-ing and whatnot, but going about it the one-stop-shopping way has never really quite been my thing. And, once I get done with all the vinyl, this whole setup is just a switch of plugs away from working for cassette to digital. Talk about flexibility...

If anyone has (or still is) considering this - or wants to offer some monetary compensation in exchange for my best effort at a "digitally remastered" copy of your favs - leave a comment. That is if anyone even reads this anymore...


Helloooo out there.....

A special shout-out

Well kinda...

I've been meaning to get a picture of this up here like all year, but have never really remembered to grab a camera when needed. Well, lucky me now finally has a camera phone, so I was able to snap an admittedly low-quality shot.

I hope [person#91858327] doesn't mind the back of his head being displayed to the masses.

In the "mine's bigger" dept. I present to you, the periodic table.

I swear there's a good reason...

And it comes in the form of a new 50 inch DLP 1080P (translation: sweet) TV. Yea, it's nice. And yes, it is the reason for the lies concerning the plethora of posts over fall break.



For those curious, what I learned while home:

1.) Dorms really do smell. Maybe it's just because mine is directly across from the "utility closet" (translation: trash room), but for some reason I doubt it.

2.) The whole "mom's cooking" thing is kinda overplayed. Now the "going out to eat on mom and dad's check" thing, THAT's something worth missing.

3.) I do not miss high school.

4.) A little break from the *ehm* college life is nice... buuuuuut

5.) I would much rather be in Stu-town than the ville.