You suffer from OCD when…

I’ve been meaning to write about my latest obsession for a while now but the only problem is… the obsession kept getting in the way.

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I got a 80GB iPod video for Christmas. This is our first mp3 player. We already had a large collection of music. I am a huge fan. I still can't see enough concerts and Jana's been working in the biz for 15 years. Add those two together over time and you end up with more than you could imagine.

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I do admit. I have been downloading a little from the Bit Torrents and a few other sites. Something Jana hasn’t always approved of, it is her job after all. Now with a new toy and a mass storage device at that. I needed to start digging out the boxes of CD’s in the basement. I started off by grabbing a few handfuls of CD’s at a time. Soon that became too slow. I would then grab a box of 50 discs and pick and choose from there. Unfortunately with such a large collection it wasn’t organized very well. Especially my CD’s, from years of grabbing a few for the car and filling those portable CD travel cases. Many weren’t in their case and when I absolutely HAD to rip that one disc… I couldn’t find it. So I would do the equivalent of dumpster diving trying to find that one elusive disc. Occasionally it was a useless attempt but I would always find a few more that were worth grabbing.

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I would keenly watch the stats on the bottom of my iTunes. Number of songs listed. The number of days of continuous play. How many Gigabytes of music that were quickly adding up. I have a 300GB external hard drive, the poor outdated P3 desktop I was using only came with 20GB. All the pictures of the girls had nearly maxed it out long ago. First I started ripping at 128kbps. This was partially through inexperience and not messing around with the iTunes program enough. 128kbps is not going to cut it. This was going to be our personal digital music library. Soon I was redoing every disk that I had originally started off with. Thankfully that was only about a third of a way through. I redid them all at 320kbps. Sure it was overkill. I didn’t have to go full CD quality but I had more than enough room on the hard drive and this is all going to be perfect right? Right?!?

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I then discovered how many CD’s we were missing. The whole Manchester scene. Jana’s Cure collection. My older metal discs and a number of movie soundtracks from the 90’s. I started a list of all the ones I could think of that I couldn’t find. For weeks the search went on between daily events. Jana was convinced that I just lost it and that they were somewhere I haven’t looked yet. I started thinking that they might have been stolen or some other freak mishap. These were CD’s I haven’t seen since before we bought our house. Did we lose them while moving? Thankfully they were in a closet I never would have thought of looking for them. (who the hell put them there? oh… me) My ripping obsession could continue.

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During all of this I was also putting together playlists. All those years of making mixed tapes were just a warm up for this. TDK and Maxell could bite my ass because now I’m not limited to 45 minutes a side. 90’s tunes. Cover songs. Chix rox! The Bad Vibe DJ Pool. (all the music the DJ’s at The Boom Boom Room, The Dance Cave, Catch 22 and The Bovine introduced me to) and of course Jana started her own Dance Party Mix! I don’t expect putting together playlists will ever grow old.

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My next obstacle came when I ran out of room on the iPod. I did start off with a number of pictures on it. Soon I took those off to free up valuable space. I had to cram as much music on it as I could. It says it holds 80GB. In truth it’s a little over 74 GB. Who would think it would take 6GB to run the damn thing. I managed to have less than 2GB of free space on it. This took some serious tweaking. The external hard drive started pushing 90… 100… 120GB of music. All those CD’s now needed to be weeded down. Key songs selected. One hit wonders evaluated. This is where I am presently at. I still find the odd CD to rip, but for now I am just adding to the hard drive.

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So as of 7AM this morning the iPod flew off to SXSW. Jana took it to pass the time on the flight and between shows. Late last night I was making last minute changes to include more of her Singer/Songwriter type of music. When she comes back I’ll have to geek out with it more. Who knows… one day I might even listen to it.