What I’ve been doing

I spent much of the past two weeks ripping all of my CD”s back into ITunes again & then nuking the old copies. The old format was a lossy 128 kbps .wav file, and the new format is a lossless version using “ALAC” (Apple Lossless Audio Compression.) The sound quality difference is noticeably improved except on some antique hi-fi Kingston Trio and Merseybeat tunes I have so better quality alone really made the effort worth it, but I also subscribed to “Match” so that all of my tunes are now in the cloud.

The big bonus at the end was also being able to see all the dupes by clicking on the “match status” Icon and nuking them. I can now also pull them down to devices that I authorize from the cloud, and Apple sends down a 256 KBPS or better version. With the nuking of the dupes accumulated over the last decade I actually ended up improving the quality of all the songs, while reducing the size by a third.

Every flat surface looked like this as I started sorting the CD's into artist piles.

During conversion the only songs that gave me any problems where some old tunes purchased digitally through rhapsody and Walmart, and then converted into a version playable by my phone and other devices by Tunebite a few years back. I was able to pull down good copies for everything except a couple of Sony tunes, which I just repurchased.

I am also playing with some macro tube lens extenders for my Canon T2i, which allow me to put the camera lens bare inches away from what I am photographing. I’m pretty happy at the price, and with the results. The section of bubbled glass you see below is about the size of a normal asprin.

sea glass float
A tiny section of a sea glass float