I feel I’ve come a long way in life, and I’m pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished in it.   I’m not sure many people on the cusp of turning 30 (next year), can say the same.

I’ve taught myself how to build websites, fix electronics, work with computers, and countless other things that I’m proud of.   I sometimes feel like I’m too hard on myself, always striving to be better at things, and I get angry when I fail.

I’ve started thinking about these things lately, not sure why. I just look back on all the years that have come and gone, and wonder where they went.   Time really does fly.   Christine and I are about to celebrate our 5th anniversary.   It’s been an amazing five years, and I can’t even imagine how it went by so fast.

Time really does go by faster when you’re an adult.   I’m not complaining, having time go by faster has helped me make it to Thursday of this week already.   Though, now that I’m looking at the clock, the time’s ticking by, minute by minute by minute.

So I splayed out all the CDs we own on my desk, and have been dropping them in my CD burner, as I’ve sat at my desk watching movies on my computer.

I learned a valuable lesson: Windows Media Player rips music much easier than iTunes.

With iTunes, you have to drop the CD in, wait for it to get recognized, then click the “Import” button, or click “Yes” on the “Do you want to import” dialog.

With Windows Media Player, you just drop the disc in, and close the drive. As long as you’re on the “Rip” tab in your player, it auto-rips the disc, and ejects it when done.   Then you grab it, and drop the next one in.

I did about 200 discs while watching The Incredible Hulk and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay over the weekend.

I’ve still got a ton more to go, but it’s a start.   I wish I could remotely rip discs from work, to home. That’d be a big help, but I don’t think technology’s that advanced, yet.

So far, we’ve got about 39.5 gigs of music on the new terrabyte drive (aptly named “music”), with I’d guess another 100 gigs to go.   Good thing I bought a big drive, we buy a lot of music.

Finally!   It certainly helped having the conversion application running on the better computer.   Now   that all the music’s in one directory, it’s easy to see how many duplicates of some tracks we had.

I whittled it down from roughly 18 thousand songs to just over 10.   Talk about a lot of doubles?

Now I just have to go through Windows Media Player and add a lot of artwork to some of the discs that didn’t have it.

Deleting 40 gigs of music off the old computer is a bit depressing, and knowing that it’s going to go into the closet, for “spare parts” probably will hurt, too.   She was a good computer, and served me well.   Farewell Pentium IV, 2.53 single core, it’s time for you to rest now.

I think the problem is that I was using the “old” PC to do the converting, and not my new workhorse machine.

I installed the conversion software on my better computer, and things are speeding up much faster.   A song on the new computer takes roughly 15 seconds to convert, versus a minute and a half on the old computer.   That’s going over my wireless network from the old PC (where the music’s stored) to the new PC where it’s being converted and saved.

At this rate, I should get done today or tomorrow.   I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this in the first place.

Sometimes the software craps out, and doesn’t convert a track right, but I’m sure I won’t even miss those songs that it doesn’t work right on.   Will update again shortly.

I thought it would be easy, and quick to leave iTunes.   I just wanted to break up, and start my new relationship with Windows Media Player/Center.   Why? Easy.

When we moved into our new place, there was no room in the living room for the “Media PC”, to be hooked up to the stereo anymore.   (We used to stream iTunes from it to the surround sound, and out other PCs).   So, I looked for a smaller PC, and determined it wasn’t worth it.

I then remembered that the XBox360 streams music from Windows.   Unfortunately, the 360, and iTunes don’t like each other, at all.

So, I made the decision to convert all of my music to Windows Media player, which sounded like it’d be easy.   They’re just music files, right?   Not so much.

See iTunes creates their own propriatary filetype (AAC, or M4P), when you rip a CD through them, which I’ve done with hundreds of gigs of music.   That creates a problem, as Windows Media can’t play/read AAC or M4P files.

So I had two options: 1) Re-rip hundreds of CDs, which took months to rip in my spare time, or 2) convert the music.

I opted for the music conversion, and found a program called “Protected Music Converter”, which boasts that it can “quickly and easily convert music files to mp3”. I thought “Great, it’s exactly what I need!”

I started running it at 9PM last night.   It’s not 9:15AM, over 12 hours later, and it’s only converted 457 tracks. That’s only .63 tracks per minute.   At this rate, it might have been faster to re-rip them.

It’s gonna be a long weekend. Good thing the software’s automated, and making the mp3s on its own.   Once it’s done, I just need to copy them over to my new terrabyte hard drive that I bought to house the music collection last week. (Bringing my total storage capacity to just over 8 terrabytes. I’ve got an obsession.)

Will update with a final “it took this long” post when it’s done.

Packing up the rest of our stuff over the weekend kind of depressed me.   I looked at my collection of guitars, and drums, and microphones, and mixing boards and the like, and thought about it.

It’s been a good three years since I played anything, seriously.   And even longer since I’ve written anything music related.   I’m so out of the loop, it’s saddening.

What was once my dream to do full time, is now just a memory.   I gotta try to get back into writing, and playing.   Once we are done putting away all the stuff we own, in our new home, I’m going to restring my guitars, and start playing again.   It’s time to play a guitar that isn’t plastic.   I’m going to have to break up with Guitar Hero and Rock Band for a while.   Which is also sad.