Over the years I have had several adventures with CD burning and music conversion of all types. My question is why does it have to be so damn difficult. Now back in the day when the technology was new and we were still dialing up you would use five cd’s to get one good CD. Most of the time it would stop because the computer was busy doing something else especially when it tried to dial up the ISP. Later on I bought a burner for my laptop and it was great I would only throw away about five CD’s from every spindle of 30, but still I was wasting them. However, my new problem came once I started dealing with SHN files, this is a format many of the DMB traders use because it is compressed but lossless. Now the quality of these files is great, but it is such a pain in the ass to do stuff with them. First you have to download them onto your PC and then convert them to WAV format, which is just such a huge size. Okay so now you have WAV files, but need to burn them on the CD, this would be fine if the SHN->WAV conversion worked every time, but one file always gets screwed up in the process. This particular situation occurred to me twice tonight before I moved to iTunes for my burning and was able to isolate the bad track. After getting the CD’s made I then take them and import them as AAC files onto my hard drive and finally plug my iPod in and it gets loaded. That is a lot of work just to get 31 songs on my iPod. Now all I have to do is burn an extra copy of all three discs I made tonight, that should only take about two hours. Ahhhhh!!! Now wasn’t that interesting. At least you know why I am going to stay away from those new DVD burners, I just don’t have the patience.

In other news: Despite the fact that several BoCaNO members are in Utah I will be trying to get some people together for BoCaNO on Wednesday night anyway. So I am putting it in here briefly today and then in a more organized format tomorrow. We will be going to the Miracle of Science in Central Square, Cambridge, MA. Stay Tuned!!!



Even more pictures