Ancient Media Weekend
Category: Music...
Posted Tuesday, May 30, 2006 at 08:49 AM [GMT-6]

We spent a quiet, mostly un-busy Memorial Day weekend at home. Caught a movie, did a couple of bike rides (including one Monday morning on a parallel route for our own version of Rolling Thunder...it's pretty cool being passed by more than 300 motorcycles, most of whom waved or honked at the sight of our bike, which was longer than most of them), went to our usual Saturday evening dance class (learned a killer tango step..."killer" is the proper word because you don't want to be anywhere near us when we try to pull it off), worked the TV broadcast at church Sunday morning, and took food to a family in our Sunday School class whose mother/grandmother passed away earlier that morning.

Amongst all of that we also partook of some old-school media. On Saturday afternoon, I plugged in a 1995 episode of The X-Files ("Humbug," if you must know; remember it?), one of a dozen or so we have on that flash-in-the-pan medium of laserdisc, the video equivalent of 8-track tape, only much higher quality. In fact, I continue to believe that laserdisc video is superior to any non-HD DVD I've seen.

And interspersed through the entire weekend I endeavored to digitize a half dozen LPs my wife had bought at an estate sale the weekend before. They were old ballroom dance albums (a couple by Arthur Murray and the rest by artists and on a label I'd never heard of, including Billy Mays and his orchestra; I thought he only pitched cleaning products on TV).

I used Sound Studio to record the LPs via my laptop, then ran the resulting AIFF file through SoundSoap to minimize the pops, reduced the turntable rumble, and add some low end frequency punch. I then returned to Sound Studio to break the enhanced AIFF into its component tracks, which were imported into iTunes for the addition of meta data and consolidation into a playlist, which was then loaded onto an iPod. The culmination was that Monday night, I routed a ripped tango on the iPod through the stereo and we did a little ripping ourselves.

Killer weekend...just killer.