Computer jukebox conversion
The great music collection transfer continues. I uploaded all of my movie soundtrack CDs today, and that's no small amount of discs. (There are a smattering of Broadway recordings among those, I guess.) I'm a recovering film score junkie - okay, not sure how much I've really recovered - and I've managed to amass quite a collection. There are dozens more already in MP3 form that I have yet to transfer from my old hard drive. I even discovered that I have no fewer than seventeen CDs' worth of John Williams music. I was a pretty hard-core Williams fan in high school, and that was about the time that a lot of great Williams scores were being released in splendiferous extended CDs. So I blew a lot of money on those.
Aside on Williams: I'm not quite so rabid a fan anymore, and I think his stuff is sort of uneven these days (even though he occasionally pulls out something brilliant like Catch Me If You Can or "Hedwig's Theme" - and the films he's scoring are likewise uneven) . . . but still, he would belong in the pantheon of the greatest film composers even if he had retired after 1984. In the 9 years from 1975 to 1984, he managed to crank out the scores to Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Return of the Jedi, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (It is not lost on me that all but one of those films is also the product of Steven Spielberg and/or George Lucas, from the years when they were also consistently good.) Those were hardly the only films he scored during that period, either, but when you consider just how iconic and indelible each of those scores came to be and that they were all produced in such a tight window . . . I guarantee that just about anybody can hum, say, "The Imperial March" and certainly the shark theme from Jaws, even if they've never seen the movies. You have to look back to someone like Bernard Herrmann (particularly the Psycho shower scene music) to match the cultural crossover of a theme like that.
Okay, done geeking out about Williams.
So far, the official tally of my music collection: 10.7 GB from 142 uploaded discs. There are still probably at least 100 CDs left to upload, and all the stuff yet to transfer from my old hard drive. Where she stops, nobody knows. I'm going to venture a guess that I'll end up with at least 30 GB of music. Good thing I bought the 80 GB iPod.
Aside on Williams: I'm not quite so rabid a fan anymore, and I think his stuff is sort of uneven these days (even though he occasionally pulls out something brilliant like Catch Me If You Can or "Hedwig's Theme" - and the films he's scoring are likewise uneven) . . . but still, he would belong in the pantheon of the greatest film composers even if he had retired after 1984. In the 9 years from 1975 to 1984, he managed to crank out the scores to Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Return of the Jedi, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (It is not lost on me that all but one of those films is also the product of Steven Spielberg and/or George Lucas, from the years when they were also consistently good.) Those were hardly the only films he scored during that period, either, but when you consider just how iconic and indelible each of those scores came to be and that they were all produced in such a tight window . . . I guarantee that just about anybody can hum, say, "The Imperial March" and certainly the shark theme from Jaws, even if they've never seen the movies. You have to look back to someone like Bernard Herrmann (particularly the Psycho shower scene music) to match the cultural crossover of a theme like that.
Okay, done geeking out about Williams.
So far, the official tally of my music collection: 10.7 GB from 142 uploaded discs. There are still probably at least 100 CDs left to upload, and all the stuff yet to transfer from my old hard drive. Where she stops, nobody knows. I'm going to venture a guess that I'll end up with at least 30 GB of music. Good thing I bought the 80 GB iPod.