This is the account of a true story involving me, eBay, Beatles vinyls, and a computer. Before reading this, you need to know my reasoning and little obsessive foibles: yes, of course, I could just buy the CDs, but that’s simply not the same to me… and no, you don’t need to have album artwork on your iPod- it’s not required, but it would seem unfinished if I didn’t have the album artwork. I’m just kind of weird like that…
So recently I have been buying Beatles LPs off eBay. I enjoy listening to them on a turntable, but that’s not very convenient for long car trips or jogging, so I decided to convert the songs to .aiff files so I could play them on my iPod.
August 21: For my first attempt I decided to use “Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.” Things seemed fine. I put my personal favorites from the album onto my iPod, added the album art work, and everything seemed fine.
August 27: As luck would have it, several days later the computer developed a “malicious virus” and had to go to the computer ER. When I got it back, the image program I primarily used, Picture It! 9, was no more!…
September 1: Then I recorded the “Let It Be” album. Sound quality seemed fine to me, but I could not figure out how to add album artwork without Picture It! 9… Oh, well, I guess, but then the real problem occurrs… read on…
sometime in Mid-September: Eventually, I got around to recording “Sgt. Pepper” and the main vocal track of the title song was missing. For a moment, I feared that I had accidentally purchased the karaoke version of the album (and even thought that I could make a lot of money on such a rare item). Soon I realized that it was because I was recording a stereo track in mono… but the me of two months ago didn’t own an RCA stereo mini (or even know what one was).
So let’s recap: where does this leave me? No album artwork, worthless sound quality.
Early October: Time to fight back. First off, album artwork. After many failed ideas and a time-wasting call to iTunes support (”Yes, we have determined we can not solve your Apple iTunes problem”), I figured out what to do…
So, I put the songs from the record to a computer, from the computer to a CD, from the CD to a different computer, and from the different computer to my iPod. Yes, it’s a lot of work for album artwork… but I still have to worry about the sound quality problems.
Mid-October: I buy an RCA stereo mini cord… it works. Sound quality still sounds a bit fuzzy and a click once in a blue moon, but that’s to be expected when you’re using a cheap program and old records.
November 2: I have decided that the next time I come upon spare cash, I’ll be buying the Beatles CDs… just so that I’m not bothered by those clicks and fuzzy background effects. The way I figure, this way works the best – I get the old school vinyls (which I prefer), and I get the new age hipster CDs, which offer better sound quality… so pretty much, this whole thing could’ve been avoided.
Music
ebay, iPod Touch, The Beatles
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