Sunday, September 18, 2005

My music conversion project

Friends,

This time around last year I was getting ready to move from this place. My assignment got over in the company where I am working and I was searching for new projects. Then came the news that my assignment was extended for another year.

Suddenly I faced with considerable spare time after work. I always have few things to do in mind. One of the things I had in mind was to digitize my tape collection. I have about 120 cassette tapes that I collected over a period of a decade. I always wanted to put them in digital format as the whole world was going digital. Eventually I wanted to put them in a mobile music player.

After googling around I found a real good software that can be used on trial basis. I downloaded the software goldwave (believe me this is the best software I was able to find for audio editing needs), borrowed stereo tape player from my friend (BTW I don't have a stereo tape player, I just have walkman and cassette player in my car:-)), bought a cable (which is connected to PC's line-in from the tape player) from local Radioshock and started downloading the songs into my PC as MP3s. The only bad thing in the whole process is we need to play the cassettes real time. I used to setup the settings in Goldwave, start playing the cassette and go away to attend some other business. One thing to keep in mind in this whole process is your MP3s are only as good as your tape player output. So it is imperative that you should have a very good stereo tape player.

On a part time basis it took about three months to convert all of my cassettes into MP3s with my wife's help. I created folders on my hard drive based on the album name and organized my MP3s. At the end, I felt it was worth my time. Then I wanted to backup my three months effort. I purchased an external hard drive and backed up all my MP3s.

Well, the hard part was over. However, I was getting uneasy each day those MP3s sitting idle on my PC. I burned some CDs and tried to listen at work. But I thought handling those CDs was a hassle. Well, Friends, as my wife complained, I was just trying to come up with some excuses to go for a MP3 player:-)

After considerable research I purchased Iriver H340 with 40GB capacity (BTW I like it very much). Now my whole music collection travels with me. My MP3 player also plays a format called OGG. The specialty of this format is it stores music with high sampling and bitrate in relatively small size. Goldwave software converts MP3s to OGG. I converted some of my favorite songs into OGG and I really enjoy the quality (I am not sure if you can convert to OGG directly from tape though).

-DreamsUnlimited.

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