Inventory of the Conversion

Yesterday, I talked to my co-worker Jay about the continuing saga of being unable to retrieve my files. He used a phrase that I give him full credit for: "passion of the librarian". That's what really describes me. I want a massive collection and it's not just with CDs. I have a large collection of books. I have a large collection of cassettes. I have a large collection of journals and a large collection of songs I wrote, which I had painstakingly transcribed years ago that are now lost as they were on the 1 TB hard drive.  Crap.

Anyways, last night I took an inventory of what I have in front of me while watching "The Lincoln Lawyer" in the living room. I spent some time further analyzing the purchase I made in Indianapolis from Mitch. As the picture from Monday showed, there are 4 cases. I have now identified the 4 cases as A, B, C, and D, with a little white sticker and I have now counted the number of CDs in each case:

• A has 82
• B has 92
• C has 195
• D has 111

So, when added up, there are 480 CDs. I also noticed that I already have some of them, but a lot of them are new to my collection. Bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, The Cure, and Ben Folds Five are new to my collection so I look forward to listening to those bands.

I also spent some time with my existing spindles. I have 26 spindles that hold 100 CDs each.

I have approximately 760 CDs in my CD racks, but that number may be way off because as part of the conversion, I put some CDs on spindles after converting and I put some CDs back in their original case. I don't have a clear sense of the balance. I was originally just going to keep all CDs in their original case so I could find them quickly, but then I changed that and started making piles of empty CD cases because the CD was being placed on a spindle. I didn't do a good job of being organized during the previous conversion.

I have approximately 200 CDs that I had been working on that will require me to manually enter artist, album, and other identifying information, because most are unknown bands and their information is not available in the database that Windows Media Player uses.

  480
2600
  760
  160
4000

So I'm going to start out with a guess of 4000 CDs to convert which may be totally on the mark or totally off the mark.

Notice that is the number of physical CDs, not the number of albums. The actual number of albums I have is going to be several thousand more than that because many CDs - at least 50? - are what I would call a 'data CD' that each have anywhere from 10 to 12 albums, but I don't have an accurate count.

I will say I feel somewhat lucky to have a list of my collection because of running the DOS batch file. The last time it ran successfully for the 1 TB drive that I was able to pull over to the 2 TB drive was on Thursday, 11/14/13. When I search for Directory of e:\music\ as a string of text, I find 6473 and to dig a bit deeper, of those 6473 matches, there are 154 matches for Directory of e:\music\Metallica.

I must admit that I considered quite seriously whether I wanted to create a separate blog simply for the conversion of this collection to MP3, but I decided against it because I figured that when I finished the conversion by, say, 1/1/2016, I would probably want to merge it back into this blog and it would turn into a mess. Instead, I will continue to tag the updates to the conversion so I can quickly locate all related posts. I am also going to not post daily updates of what my DOS batch file results are simply because I felt bored reading them and if I'm bored, I can't imagine what anyone else would think. I am more likely to do weekly posts and to create a separate tag, like "Conversion Project - Weekly Status" so I can take those numbers and pull them into a graph.

As I just mentioned, I am optimistically hoping to be done with this second go-round of the conversion by 1/1/2016 and I'm now trying to decide if I want to do additional prep work in the month of December and actually wait until 1/1/2014 before starting the re-conversion. I guess I'm still holding out a bit of hope that I will find a way to get the e:\music folder off of the 1 TB hard drive, even though I'm not really optimistic. I did read that the freezer trick I tried has worked for people not on the first or second attempt, but on the 3rd attempt. It may be worth it to exhaust all reasonable measures before restarting.