Mar 09 2009
Looking for Love, Truth, and Honesty
I admit it… I am a data geek. I love playing with data. (That might amaze my statistics professor from college as I wasn’t very interested back then.) Being interested in data does help in my current career… but what about having some fun with it too?
I purchased an iPod several years ago, and I really like it. As a footnote to the iPod purchase I also downloaded and installed the iTunes software. iTunes is okay. It’s not great, but it’s functional. I have quite a large library. I have what I would consider a larger than normal sized collection of discs, plus I have loaded up several albums (vinyl! 😮 ) as well. The other day I decided to have a little fun. You see, iTunes offers the ability to search for keywords. I can set it to search in a variety of fields like the song title, artist, and a few others. I left the search set on “All” and went looking for some interesting words. iTunes says I have 12,073 items, so that’s the maximum number of matches I can get.
When I searched for “Love” I found 879 items, or enough music to span 2.4 days of listening. That’s a lot of love. When I searched for “truth” I only got 33 items for a bare 2 hours. I guess love is easier to find than truth. I’m not sure what sort of observation to make from that, so I will move on. 😆
With truth being so hard to find I expected that honesty would be just as hard. It turns out it’s much worse. Searching for “honest” matched a whopping three songs for a grand total of 10.7 minutes.
What have I learned so far? Love is easy to find, truth is harder, and finding honesty is the toughest of all.
Ironically one of the songs that matched the search term “Honest” was the song “Love, Truth, and Honesty” by Bananarama. They match all three search terms with that one song. Score one for 80’s girl bands. 😎
Some other items I played with include compass directions:
North: 6 items, 21.7 minutes
South: 109 items, 8.5 hours
East: 48 items, 3.1 hours
West: 31 items, 2.1 hours
… and the seasons…
Summer: 66 items, 4.2 hours
Fall: 99 items, 6.6 hours
Winter: 48 items, 3 hours
Spring: 28 items, 1.9 hours
I am always looking for extra time in order to get things done, so I decided to look for “time” in my iTunes library. I found 409 items (1.1 days) so that should provide some extra time when I need it.
What should I do with this extra time? Should I work (205 items, 13 hours) or play (77 items, 5.1 hours)? Seems like work wins out, which oddly enough seems to match reality. Bummer.
If I had the chance to play, would I drive my car? (711 items, 2 days) or drive my truck? (7 items, 58.4 minutes) Clearly the car is the choice here. 🙂 I would imagine it to be a lot more fun (101 items, 5.6 hours) unless mud (6 items, 25.4 minutes) or dirt (85 items, 5.5 hours) were involved.
So what should I search (5 items, 20.8 minutes) for next? 🙂
What about “deliverable”? “Documentation”? Certainly “redundant” would show up(and hopefully more than once).
Seriously, though, I’d wonder how many hits you would get with advice? Gamble? What about God vs. the Devil?
Do tell, what did you use for your vinyl conversions? I’ve got at least 800 12″ records in my back office, most of them ones I couldn’t replace because they never came out on CD, and I’ve seen some of the devices they sell in the skymall catalog, but wondered how well they work. What did you use?
Jamie, I will try those when I get home. Thanks for the suggestions. 🙂
nod, what I did was hook my turntable to my tuner, and then the line out from the tuner goes into the line in on my sound card in my desktop. I used Nero to record and clean up the tracks. It has been doing a good enough job for me. From there I take the wav files and create an audio CD (also using Nero). I then “rip” the audio CD back into iTunes for use on my iPod.
I also looked at getting a USB turntable, but wasn’t impressed with any of the reviews. Since I already had the other equipment it was just as easy to do it that way.
Have you seen the laser turntable? 🙂 Google it if you want; it’s an interesting concept.
I’m not here to give suggestions to you Dave! Then why am I here? 🙄
Just to give you an applause for your RESEARCH!!!! 😀
This is an excellent guide to the process of ripping LPs to a computer, but it’s rather . . . in-depth.
There are software packages out there now which claim to make the process a lot easier. I ripped a few LPs to my computer back around 2000, and more recently ripped some old VHS Hi-Fi tapes. I found both processes rather involved.
My favorite audio editing software – GoldWave – made the whole process much easier. It’s a powerful and complicated package, but may be worth learning if you’re considering ripping 800(!!!) LPs. Last I checked GoldWave was still remarkably affordable.
One bit of advice – make sure you have lots of RAM (at least 2GB) and plenty of hard drive space. You’ll need it. I probably wouldn’t burn and then rip CD-Rs to iTunes, though. I think iTunes can directly convert .WAV files to other formats. If not, there’s a package out there which can access iTunes and use it to convert between various formats. The wonderful MediaMonkey media player software can also convert between various formats, including the .AAC format used by iTunes.
I’d probably rip to the lossless FLAC format – which GoldWave supports, along with MediaMonkey – edit in GoldWave, save the edited, cleaned FLAC copies for archival use, and then have MediaMonkey create 128kbps .AAC copies for use in iTunes and on iPods and iPhones.
Good luck!
Whoops – here’s the hyperlink to the big LP to PC guide I was talking about:
http://www.delback.co.uk/lp-cdr.htm
Advice (good or otherwise) is hard to find, with only 2 entries (6.8 minutes)
I was intrigued by the idea of looking for God versus the Devil 😆 and found God in 37 items (good for 2.3 hours of listening time) and the Devil shows up in only 28 items (1.6 hours). A search for “spirit” finds 27 matches (1.6 hours); “heaven” on the other hand finds 65 matches (4.7 hours) and “angel” checks in at 105 matches (7.4 hours).
Dan, I took a look at the link you provided, and it seems to match what I’m doing as far as the “plumbing” aka cable configuration goes. Is there a reason for why you’re suggesting not going to CD (audio) and then ripping to iTunes? One reason I am doing this is to have an audio disc that I can play in a player that doesn’t support mp3 formats. So there are two purposes for getting the disc made, it’s not just for iTunes.
Cool thing the laser turntable, but at what a price…
Andreas, if you read the site, you’ll have seen that each one is essentially made by hand. But yeah, expensive. 🙂
You should have named this “What’s so funny about Peace, Love and Understanding?” … Then you could have used the Elvis Costello reference instead of Bananarama
Of course i loved “With truth being so hard to find … ”
but I’m surprised you didn’t use “Looking for Love in all the wrong places …”
lol
One reason I am doing this is to have an audio disc that I can play in a player that doesn’t support mp3 formats.
Oh, that’s why you’re burning a CD, then ripping it to iTunes. That makes sense, then.
My only concern would be, burned CDs aren’t always that durable. I’d probably want to maintain a losslessly-compressed version in FLAC format on a hard drive somewhere. A drive that gets backed up routinely. It’s a LOT of work ripping all those LPs (or even ripping CDs), and I’d hate to lose any/all of that.
Which reminds me – I still need some sort of offsite backup solution.
My desktop at home has RAID (mirror) disks. 🙂 I also have an inexpensive NAS (network storage) that is also RAID-ed where I store most of my data. On a periodic (random) basis I copy files from one device to the other to maintain more than one copy.
Doesn’t address the “offsite” portion of your comment though…