Due to smoke emitting from my housemate's laptop, we had to ship it off to CA for repairs. At least it's still under warranty. For anyone interested in such things, it is a cute and capable Averatec brand, fairly light with a 12.1 screen.

Thus we are in the unenviable position of sharing a computer and a dialup internet connection for the duration. This is a recipe for madness and stress and anger management issues but we are coping moderately well. However, readers may note that I haven't been posting as frequently due to the situation. I'm trying to store up some items and rants for the future. Patience.

In the realm of fun new timewasters, I've finally gotten my act together to pick up some software and move the turntable into the office to begin the process of ripping some of my multitudinous vinyl disks to the computer. This is not for the faint of heart. After some poking around, I settled on a software bundle over at DAK and their DePopper which cleans up the resulting WAV files of surface clicks and pops quite well.

But, geez, what a production! First, there's playing the LP into the WAV recorder which seems to take an incredibly long time because it's done in real time. It's not like ripping a CD which can be done almost at the top speed of the CD drive. Fortunately, there's a component of the software which will break the songs apart. Then, while it's still huge WAV files (typically 20-50 megs per song), I have to run the DePopper on the files. It can be done in the background but still takes a couple of minutes per song. When that's done, I downsize the WAV files to MP3s which are about a tenth the size. Then comes the labeling and tagging of the tracks. There's a piece of software which supposedly can dig up all the individual track tag info from a whole album if all the tracks are submitted at one time but I haven't been able to get it to play nice yet.

The upside is not having to rebuy stuff I already own. Yeah, some CD re-releases have interesting bonus tracks or are remastered but I'm looking forward to becoming reacquainted with my approx. 12 linear feet of vinyl music. So much of it isn't available on CD and may never be. Although the following is not entirely representative of what I own or what I've missed most over the years, here are the first few albums I've transferred.

• The Buzzcocks: A Different Kind of Tension
• Iggy Pop: TV Eye (Live recordings from 1977. A few of the cuts are on the Sister Midnight CD but the rest of the tracks are superior versions to those on that CD.)
• The Godfathers: Birth, School, Work, Death Nils Lofgren/Grin: 1+1 (Nils Lofgren is better known as a later member of Bruce Springsteen's band but he had a fair career in the seventies with Grin and as a solo act.)

So that's what I'm doing in my spare moments.