Really, twice each. Once ripped to WAV for Plex, a second ripped to lossless for iTunes.
I’m hedging my bets against Apple not letting me serve my collection locally any longer. ITunes continues to be iTunes. I can’t believe how slowly it all runs, aggravated by needing to use external storage—but it works.
With Plex, I have a migration path to an open source OS and commodity hardware. This is assuming Plex remains viable as a project, of course. But with WAV files I sould be able to convert to other formats with ease, and I hope that need won’t arise for years.
Streaming is lovely, but rights being what they are, you can’t stream everything you remember hearing.
Back to iTunes, of course I have made a mess of my library. I have been using iTunes Match, which is a backup of sorts, and a streaming library of sorts, and boy it helped me through a massive file loss (self-inflicted) a few years ago.
What iTunes Match has done, which is pretty cool in a lot of ways, is replace low-bitrate MP3 files with higher bitrate AAC files on my local PC. So, many CDs that I ripped to MP3 (when disk space was more expensive) now have better sounding files on disk than I had in, say, 2003. I started ripping to MP3 circa 1998, so you might imagine.
This did not go perfectly, naturally.
Many of my albums have matched AAC files in addition to some MP3 files. This inflates the number of tracks in an album. Track order is preserved, but there could be two copies of several tracks per album. Further, where re-ripping is concerned, if there is the slightest metadata difference, iTunes will not necessarily replace tracks or albums but add them as net-new.
So. For each “album,” my process has been to find the one I’m replacing, delete the iTunes Match downloads, then I delete the album and the files from my library altogether. Finally, I import the CD, doing a spot check of the tracklist and production year. ITunes has been doing a decent job of finding cover art. I would estimate out of the discs I’ve ripped so far, the art matched 9 times out of 10.
Tonight, though, I noticed an eventuality I hadn’t anticipated. With albums winking out of existence and back in, that is going to mess with the playlists I have been carefully curating since I went all-in on MacOS in 2005.
Remember a post ago I mentioned how I keep inventing new ways to lose information?
So, unless I can figure out how to export playlists from iTunes wholesale, I am going to be recording my playlists here so that I can rebuild them. This a bit like how I take a screenshot of the taskbar on one Windows PC to replicate pinned applications and organization on another.
Re-ripping must pause.
With this project, I’m repairing damage and in doing so I am creating more damage.
The “Smart Playlists” I believe should be self-healing. It’s the ones I have created manually, and OMG there are so many, that are going to break.
The plan is to create a new Playlist category here, then there will be individual titled posts per playlist, and the Archive page will collect them in one place.
My biggest risk, with respect to long-term retention of any digitized or otherwise computer-based information, is myself. I repeatedly invent new scenarios from which I am unable to recover.
I had a small amount of angst about ripping CDs to WAV and not doing any conversion to a more compact format. However, seeing Plex push straight PCM to my AppleTV or DLNA to my receiver, I’m feeling better about the decision. Plex deals with metadata with a fair amount of grace.
I use Apple Wallet functionality almost every week day, both via phone and watch. I did not know that the “bank card” in my Apple Wallet would expire independently of the physical card expiration.
It does. Looks like a two-year registration that must be redone, and isn’t a simple matter of updating an expiration date and CVS.
Apple Wallet then sent transactions to a credit card and put me over my limit. I did not note any notification anywhere the preferred bank card had expired. I’m wondering if I missed something, somehow. And I’m feeling disgruntled.
I only noticed at all because I went to check a balance and it was not what I expected. In the Wallet app on my iPhone, the entry for the bank card had a red expired indicator. But there was no indicator on the Wallet app icon itself. Thankfully, nothing had been declined and that was the worst of it.
I was pleasantly surprised by accidentally discovering Universal Control just working on an old iPad at work. I had assumed this was one way, where the Mac controlled the iPad.
Tonight I discovered the trackpad and keyboard of my iPad case will also control my MacBook.
I am astonished by the detail I don’t remember while surprised how much of my recollection of the story is written over by the movies. I noticed this as well with another series.
I was at a company function a few days ago. A pair at the gathering approached excitedly to tell me they had walked across Reykjavik. There, they purchased and brought back a sweater, which was now being worn by one of the two. They were excited to show me because they had been told I was from Iceland.
Somehow there has been discussion of where I’m from, where Iceland was the answer. I’m reasonably certain it’s the unique order of consonants and vowels that constitute my full name. My name has apparently been going around without me.
I’m Wisconsin born, but I’m from Minnesota. The origin story of how I got my name, which includes the European Theatre of World War II, but does not include Iceland, is far more dramatic than the tale of where I’m from. I’m happy to tell you where I’m from. And I’m happy to tell the story of my name, which began decades before my birth.
The tale of how they got the sweater is a good one to tell. It was a really nice sweater. And now, they can add color, about the guy who was, disappointingly, not from the same place.
In yet another nod to me not being in the correct demographic, I lament today that the Apple Journal app is only available on my phone. Not my iPad or Mac where I can properly sit down at the keyboard and bleed. Blood on the oliophobic and water resistant phone is not at all the same.
Jeopardy Tournament of Champions is making me feel less smart than I felt a few short hours ago. I don’t generally go around feeling smart. Nevertheless, less so, now.
