1. As-Is & To-Be
More-or-less shown here in pictures. The turntable will go; the cassette players, probably the minidisk players too. But occasionally visitors come around with a CD in hand so maybe these should remain. And the FM tuners? Probably these also should remain ‘just in case’.
2. What to do with the vinyl?
I have been through one iteration of transferring music from vinyl to digital media when I moved a lot of my favorites onto minidisk. It is really time consuming. You have the opportunity to listen to all your music – because the process happens at analogue playing speed. But this is not enough compensation. Then you need to manually insert all the track breaks, scrolling back and forth through the music looking for the gaps. Then you have to create the metadata to identify the album and artist and tracks.
3. The cassettes?
Does anyone use these? Probably just those with an old car and a cassette radio system. Mostly these were copies of other peoples albums. And some of them were transferred happily to minidisk, so these belong on the big music catalogue.
4. The mini-disks?
O Sony! I love to hate Sony! How could they create a digital format and then make it so secret and proprietary that the only way to tranfer music is via an analogue signal.
5. On-line storage
This will be the target system. Or is it just a disk drive?
6. Ripping the CDs
And is there anything better than ITunes for this task? Of course there is! But format is first – obviously it should be ‘lossless’ – then the software tool comes next.
7. And next …
compatibility with car system Ipod for podcasts and music and ITunes used currently
and video – getting the Iplayer on the main TV