This will be a day long remembered…

It has seen the end of vinyl, and it will soon see the end of the laserdiscs.

Some background:

A bit over a year ago, I finally copied the last of our records to MiniDisc and put the turntable into a sturdy cardboard box which was then placed into storage – never to be removed, I thought.

A few months after THAT, I found the box full of 45s that I’d missed during the mass record-to-MiniDisc conversion, and I was mightily peeved.  Not quite peeved enough to dig back into storage and finish the job, it was just an upsetting discovery.

About three weeks ago, my ever patient but occasionally insane wife went on a screaming nostalgia kick for the musical stylings of Shaun Cassidy, a 1970s pop star whose work, as it is, is largely unavailable on Compact Disc.  So she bought some Shaun Cassidy LPs and told me, get these things into a format from which they can be copied to my Zen, and do it now.

With this powerful motivation, I was moved to de-storage, de-box, and re-connect the turntable, record the two LPs on to the PC using Audacity, break them up into tracks, burn them to CD and give them to her to be ripped and moved to her Zen.

The turntable sat idle for some weeks.

Today, the box of 45s caught the full brunt of my unstoppable organizational willpower, and now I have about 50 seperate Audacity projects that need to have some small bits of cleanup done, but that represent all the 45s made into digital audio.  I am done.

I also had, at the beginning of today, one final laserdisc box set to encode to MPEG2.  It consists of nine discs of “King of the Burning Desert, Gandalla” a fine series and one whose place as the final thing encoded should not be taken as a reflection of its quality.

As I look to my left, it is halfway through the first episode on disc nine, and before I go to bed tonight it will be finished.

There’s still a lot of half-way-done projects.  All those LPs copied to Minidisc, for example, don’t do me much good and will need to be copied into a PC.   I still have about a hundred VHS tapes.  I’ll still need to do some editing of the laserdisc encodes that I’ve already done.  But it’s all entered the digital realm, and now I can put the turntable and the laserdisc players into storage and hopefully leave them there.