Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

In my case, it has nothing to do with convenience, and believe it or not, everything to do with quality.

Shrink-to-fit, badly-mastered recordings... These are the cards we've been dealt.

Ripping CDs is the sort of ritual I hate. I nevertheless spend countless hours ripping CDs to various hard drives, and countless hours building a system to play back the resulting files.

What's more, the "convenience" of it all (and I used to see it that way) is resulting in horrible listening habits and ignorance. Having everything on a server for years now, I don't bother listening to newly acquired CDs via the CD transport... I'll just rip them straight away, placing the physical copies on the shelf, never again to be touched. This has resulted in an ability to recognize within seconds, many many pieces of music, without being able to identify the artist or composer, or even recall the image of the associated cover art; I simply "know the tune".

It gets worse ; along with all this comes the tendency to let the computer select files at random; if not in the mood for a given selection, simply zap on through to the next random selection without ever getting up to see who the artist might be. Theoretically, it's a simple matter of looking at the screen, but I don't do it (I also tend to leave the screen black) and, unless it's something really special, I'll remain ignorant. "Manually" selecting a file from the library, does not have the same "educational" result as going over to the shelf and pulling out a physical copy, loading it into the CD transport, and letting the tracks play out.
I need to get control of these bad habits, but I have no plan to stop using the music server, and this is due only to the associated quality of sound.

I can only imagine what might be possible with less compromised recordings... FM broadcasts should hold a clue, and though I have invested somewhat seriously in this direction, and do frequently listen to FM, even live broadcasts do not necessarily sound better than a "good" CD, ripped and played back via the server. This however not being Boston; it is entirely possible that a comparable level of care is not being exercised when capturing live sound.

jd*

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site