Happy Mothers Day! / Who Gives A Rip

This weekend Erin and I celebrated Mother's Day with our two favorite mothers. Saturday night was dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory with my mom (it's one of her favorites), followed by some intense competition at Pop-A-Shot and Skee Ball with my sister and brother-in-law at Jillian's. Let it be declared that despite her collegiate basketball skills, I can still take my wife on any day at Pop-A-Shot. For Mother's Day, we got my mom an assortment of things for her kitchen, including some sponges and dish towels. My, what great gift givers, you're probably thinking -- every mother longs for a new sponge on their designated holiday! This gift was born out of my mom's love of old sponges and towels. When I was growing up, we moved more frequently than my mom replaced the sponge at our kitchen sink. If you went to wipe down the countertop with it, it would try to crawl away from you. Now in her defense, she did run it through the dishwasher frequently (on second thought, I'm not really sure that's in her defense) so it wasn't quite the petri-sponge that it might have been otherwise. Last week Erin saw something on the TV talking about how you'd be wiser to dine off the seat of the toilets in your house rather than keep a sponge at your kitchen sink for more than a week, so we got her sponges. Similarly, dish towels in our house were only tossed once you could count the number of threads left in the towel, so we got her some towels, too. I love you, mom, and we fully expect you to use those sponges before the end of the summer.

Yesterday we celebrated with Erin's parents, sister, and nieces by going to church with them and then heading to the Original Pancake House. While similarly named, this restaruant bares little resemblence to a traditional IHOP. For one thing, you never have to say things like, "I'll have the 'Two Moons Over My Hammy' with a side of 'Rooti Tooti Fresh and Fruity.'" Man does that place annoy me. In any case, this pancake place serves pretty much massive quantities of food, including these weird egg-dome omelettes. Afterward we went to Costco with Erin's folks, and since we were all so full from lunch, we only tried one of each sample offered. It was a delightful trip. Happy Mother's Day, Deb and Deanna! And also, Happy Mother's Day-to-be to my lovely wife Erin whose child is being surrogately carried by the Chinese government. Touching.

The other big achievement this weekend was the completion of my massive iTunes CD ripping project. I started ripping all of my CDs into iTunes sometime around Thanksgiving, and I'm finally finished (I'm actually a handful of discs from being finished, and I haven't touched Erin's collection, but it still feels like I'm finished). In the end, I have ended up with about 70 GB of MP3s, which covers about 1400 CDs. I have more than a month of continuous music available now. Wee! Based on the final song counts, it would appear that my favorite groups are the Beach Boys, the Everly Brothers, the Kinks, R.E.M., and XTC. Sounds about right. A few people have asked, so here are some of the technical details of the project. (In other words, most of you can stop reading here and skip to the last paragraph.)

First off, I realize that I could easily just toss the CD in the drive and let iTunes import it. This has a couple of issues for me. First off, ripping this way on my PC leaves lots of little pops and clicks in the resulting tracks, which drive me batty. So I decided early on that I would use Exact Audio Copy in Secure Mode to insure that the resulting track would be identical to the original. I configured EAC per this website, which was very helpful. The only downside of using this method is that the ripping is at approximately 1/3 the speed of a normal rip, so the project immediately takes much longer than normal. Next, I considered whether to use iTunes to encode the resulting WAV files into a compressed format, such as MP3. Since I was already ripping outside of iTunes, I shopped around for external compressors and decided after much reading at HydrogenAudio that I would use the free MP3 encoder called LAME. (LAME is available for download here. I used the 3.97 beta 2 version.) I wanted to stick to MP3s because we own another older RCA LYRA that really only works with MP3, and I wanted to be able to use the resulting files on this player or my new iPod. Once I decided to use LAME, I made a couple of test discs with various tracks at various quality levels. My goal was to find a compression level where I couldn't hear a difference from the original track, yet the tracks were small enough to use on my older LYRA as well. I ended up using the "V 4" setting in LAME. I couldn't hear any difference using my burnt up ears between "V 2" which is the standard mode for LAME and "V 4" which is the medium mode. The resulting files using "V 4" are significantly smaller, so that's the mode I used. Here's a link to a page discussing LAME and all it's options. My command line for LAME within EAC was as follows:

-V 4 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --ignore-tag-errors --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d

This pretty much boils down to "rip it in V4 quality and tag the MP3 with the artist, track title, album name, album year, and track number." I ripped to a temp directory, then imported the resulting files into iTunes, allowing it to manage my library, so it copied the tracks in, and I deleted my original file. Once the file was in iTunes, I used this little iTunes Art Importer to add the album art to each file. Basically this program looks the CD up at Amazon.com and grabs the art from their listing. Very slick. For anyone that's looking, I used a version of the program available at this link, which is not listed on the website. This version is much newer and contains many features that the advertised version does not. It doesn't appear that the author is supporting this thing any more, which is a shame since it's such a cool piece of software. In any case, once the album art was inserted, the process is pretty much complete. I'm going to make a full backup of the library to DVD (I've been making incremental backups all along following my little hard drive disaster, but I still want to make a full backup as well.) Additionally I've been backing everything up to a second hard drive (the replacement drive from said disaster). All this backing up (actually the whole project) has my wife thinking I'm looney, but after six months of work, I'm not about to lose any of this because of a hard drive crash. I'd lose my mind (or what's left of it).

After it's all said and done, the resulting tracks sound great, and I can't imagine needing any other electronic copy of all my music. I realize that purists would have ripped everything to a non-compressed format, just in case something better than MP3 comes along later, but I just didn't have the space to do this, and buying a bunch of hard drives wasn't really an option (I love you, dear.) The beauty of this project is that now my lovely wife will be able to enjoy all her favorite Hüsker Dü and Pavement records while driving to Hilton Head in a couple of weeks. That Erin sure does love her post-punk college rock.

Bret