Friday 29 February 2008

For the love of vinyl...

Once upon a time I bought an iPod. I bought it not for a huge memory, or video capability... but because it was Pink. It served me well for some years until finally the battery was fried. Then I bought a new iPod. This time I didn't buy a pink one - I bought it for a huge memory and video capability. My first iPod had and 8GB memory. Given my extensive (not so much) music collection this seemed quite enough. My new iPod has an 80GB memory. More, I think we can all agree, than I will ever fill. This enormous amount of storage means that my previous policy of only choosing certain favourite tracks from albums has been abandoned in favour of transferring entire albums, and not just mine - but those of the entire household! And still plenty of space. Something has been bothering me though. Some albums I only owned on tape cassette... not so bad as many had been replaced by 'best of' CDs and so forth. Worse was one album I only owned on vinyl (never a big record purchaser, me). It can't be bought on tape cassette or CD. What to do?

All was not lost, my nearly-mother-in-law had purchased a gadget. You plug it into your stereo and your computer... and hey presto! Fully compatible with Vista (according the shopping channel from which it was purchased). Not so much. Vista Compatibility Wizard suggested purchasing updated software (!). We gave up. Until I had a brainwave. We still have in our possession our old laptop, whose operating system is Windows XP. Hurrah! Software installed gadget working. Lovely LP transferred. Somehow I managed to write the same six tracks twice instead of twelve different tracks so I'll have to do the whole hook up again... but at least it works. I might even look out my 45s!!!

Far more disturbing was the cupboard in the corner of the room in which the vinyl resides. It is a cupboard of shame. Stacked to bursting with goodness knows what. I suggested to Rich that we might like to spring clean it at Easter, that will be a task and a half!