As of today, I’ve digitized 184 albums from Rob’s collection, for a total of 39GB of music. I had to dissect the first player because I could not get the motor to work for love or money; it just sits and makes a screeching noise and no amount of cajoling will get it working. Because the carousel spins 360˚ all the way around the unit, there are sections where plastic shields cover the CDs inside and it’s impossible to put them back in place once they’re pulled out. Rob tossed all of the plastic cases and kept the sleeves inside CD binders, but I don’t have those here, so I’ve got to find another way to store them once I’ve pulled them out. I think I’m going to find a 3/4″ dowel at the Lowe’s and build a quick spindle to store them vertically in a stack, because that’s the only way I can keep them organized once they’re out. 165 is less than half the capacity of the first unit—they take 400 discs total, and there’s another unit sitting on the floor that’s equally full.
The next chore will be to replace the duplicate files in my collection with the newer, better quality files (these are in .m4a format, which is lossy but an improved format from .mp3). I’ve got a number of incomplete albums that suffered from a strange glitch iTunes had back in 2004 where it dropped the first track on each album I ripped, so I have to find those and update them as well.
The photo project has concluded, and after a week and a half’s painstaking manual work I’ve sorted through the folder year by year to organize everything by Month/Day. This served to allay many of my fears that I’d lost entire months of photos, because of the fucked-up way iPhoto and Aperture catalogued things. As I stepped through each folder I found folders of photos that belonged in subsequent years, and as I slowly moved things to where they should be it became clear that I hadn’t lost anything. I also weeded out gigabytes of duplicate images that had been spread out among the folders, which freed up a bunch of space.
Next up is installing a small SSD boot drive in the spare slot above the DVD drive, so that I can keep all four internal slots free for data. I’m going to try to trick it to load 10.11 so that it’s running a somewhat more up to date OS. (I’m running 10.11 on a MacBook Pro through deception that is the same generation as the tower and is arguably less powerful).