I’m having a blah sort of day. It’s cloudy out and humid and hot and I’m tired. I went for a walk again this morning and I’ve been working on getting my music collection all organized on my computer. And that’s all I’ve done today. I have a dozen projects sitting here in my office that I could, and maybe should be doing, but I just can’t pull up the motivation.
I am absolutely tickled about my music, though. I haven’t been keeping care of that because I don’t usually listen to music on my home computer. I have a music box that I carry with me and I listen to music on that. But I realized that there’s a lot of music in my collection that wasn’t making it on to the box. Part of that problem, I realized, was because the music wasn’t on my computer to start with. And another part of that problem was that the files were saved in a format that didn’t work with my portable.
So I found a converter that works really well. And I’ve been copying files from CDs onto my harddrive. And then I’ve been going through and fixing the file names and making sure everything looks right and is organized right. And then finding more music that I could add. And fixing those names and reorganizing.
And syncing the one to the other again and again and again because something is always just a little bit off. And for some reason 290-some songs always think that the ones on the music box are different from the ones on my computer even though I can’t see a single thing that would be different between the two. They’re the same files! Silly electronic devices, talk with each other nicely!
But I’m proud of the converter program that I was able to find. I got it from C-Net’s download page, which I figured was one of the most secure places to get downloads. And it’s this great, simple little program that does exactly what I want it to do–take the files, make them into mp3s and put them back in the same spot. Ding! Done.
I’m also proud of how, with the programs I downloaded, because I downloaded two of them and then deleted the weird one that didn’t work, I was able to remove the faulty program and then fix my system menu to remove the extra shortcuts and programs that both programs installed on my system and get everything exactly like I wanted it to be set. I can be computer savvy! It’s great.
I can also be obsessive. I’ve been working on this music thing since Sunday. Hours and hours of converting files, renaming files, refiling files, and then syncing them with my music box.
Oh! And then let’s talk about podcasts!
Or not.
Because I have 200 Escape Pod podcasts and a couple hundred other files for Pod Castle and I Should Be Writing and PodRunner and 5 different Podiobooks.com subscriptions and the 7am NPR News Summary. And they won’t all fit on my music box. And I want to have some of them upload automatically when they update and only have 5-10 of the others on my music box at a time because I’m still going through the archives. And if I can get the 290-some files to stop making faces at themselves, then I can get my music box to automatically sync each time I plug it in and have a rotating podcast library that I can carry with me and not overwhelm the file size.
And it’s been taking me forever.
And Justin keeps laughing at me when he sees that I’m still working on the same project.
But the files! They must be organized! And they are! And it’s at 30% of the sync and then I’ll be able to look at how well it actually turned out this time!
I really hope this is the last time.