Kevin's Watch

Cag, I don't know how long, or where, you're vinyl has been in storage..but I had some go through a flood [fortunately, not on the floor, or they'd have had inches of mud..not just dampness and minor silt]...but the point is, if your getting skips, no matter how cheap your usb turntable, it can't possibly have a worn needle, it's not old enough. Easy, safe, and inexpensive way to make sure vinyl is clean..go to anywhere [even wal-mart] get the spray and cloth for cleaning glasses, and wipe down your vinyl...just wipe in a circle, following the grooves, and do in short gentle strokes with a lift at the end, so you don't grind any particles INTO the vinyl. Put my flooded Kiss live albums on my comp...clean as a whistle. Damn..It's cold gin time again...

I edit this to say...my nephew just told me I don't know how crappy USB tables can be...I told him to stop reading over my shoulder, and he still has to put the shingles on my roof in 3 hours no matter how hung over he is.

One of the things I miss is when going thru my collection you could recognize albums by their color scheme, the pattern on the spine, etc. Now they're all just another line of text on the computer/ipod screen. Sure, there's album art, but that's not usually visible when you're just scrolling through the list. But of course, I rarely listen to albums any more. I mostly listen to my playlists on shuffle

When I moved last year I went thru all my old cassettes and threw out 100's of them. I kept some that were hard to find, or live recordings (which I could probably find on dime or somewhere), and of course my old bands' tapes which for some strange reason have not yet been immortalized in the internet cloud.

And just recently, getting ready to move again, I got rid of many of the remaining ones... I either had gotten them in digital format, or decided, another year I haven't listened to them, do I really want to take them across the country just to keep in storage? I still intend to copy the rest to mp3 at some point; but whether or not I'll ever get to it, I don't know. It's not like I'm running out of tunes to listen to.

It's a trip to think that a cassette holds 60-90 minutes of music. Now that same sized object can hold over 60 *days* !!

Savor Dam wrote:Please tell us that you gave away Yessongs and Quadrophenia to good homes, rather than tossing them in the trash.

(I feel like the mother on the AT&T Wireless ads who's children are throwing away perfectly good airtime minutes instead of holding them over for use in another period...)

I think if you dropped some Cassetes off at goodwill you would get an angry phone call. Hell, CD's are going the way of the cassette now.

I don't know, MP3 and ubiquitous Burners came along right at my most formative year (around when I was 11 or 12). It's hard for me to be nostalgic about that hand-me-down Walkman I used before that. My modern musical life didn't begin until the first time I listened to Ok Computer, on CD, when I was 14.

It's strange, I feel nothing about the CD's collecting dust under my bed right now. I finally got an MP3 player (120 gigs, enough to last me the rest of my life, my entire CD collection filled maybe 10). and have whipped out the old Wallets like 3 times since I finally got it all on here.

I will always prefer the album format. I don't make playlists. (I use shuffle sometimes) Is it dying? Maybe, but any group that cant put at a dozen listenable tracks in the same place isn't worth a damn anyway as far as I'm concerned.

The album format was kind of anomalous when it came around in the 60s anyway. Like most great things about pop music, you can blame this one on the Beatles.

P.S. (Oh, and my zune has a really nice feature where it covers the screen with the cover of the album you are playing, which really gives it that "collection" feel. You can immediately tell what is coming on just by looking at the screen.)

[quote="Relayer"] It's not like I'm running out of tunes to listen to.
[quote]

Don't tell my wife this, but I'm a little inspired by this statement. I really should start getting rid of stuff, but I guess I need time to do so. I really am interested in recording off most of my albums. And there are certainly cassettes that I need to record off as well. But maybe I won't worry about every little crap album I've collected/been given. Even if occasionally it will spice up the shuffle feature on the iPod, I don't need every good song on there. And maybe I should start burning DVDs full of music and getting rid of a heap. Then again, I do need to have time to do this.

Oh, and Vraith, I do clean the records. The arm is a piece of crap, and you have to adjust the weights and counterweights to get it to work. I need a master to adjust it, but I suspect it still will skip.