A Tedious Project

Last month I started a project that was long over due. It took me awhile because I wasn’t sure I could do it. Thanks to some really helpful friends, I have the pieces in place to get it done.

A couple years ago, the iPod Classic that I bought in the early 2000’s stopped playing in one headphone. I was told this happens and there is nothing I can do about it. The original computer that I used for iTunes has not been working for years, so there was no way to take what I had and transfer it. I tried, but couldn’t remember my Apple ID.

So, after talking to a few friends, I learned that if you plug the iPod into a computer and click the “show hidden files” button, the music that is stored on the iPod becomes visible. Then, you can plug in an external drive to the computer and transfer the songs to it. There are some negatives, though.

First of all, despite the fact that you can see that the song is “Blue Moon” by Frank Sinatra, Apple renames every file with 4 letters. So it comes up “JFXY” or “WKSP”. The second issue is that many of the songs are are in an iTunes format. So now, if I want to play them from a flash drive in the car, they have to be converted to an MP3 or WAV format.

Another friend told me about a program called Audacity. It is similar to other digital editors I have used at various radio stations over the years. You open the iTunes formatted tune and export it to another drive in an MP3 format.

After downloading all the folders that contained songs from my iPod, there are about 40-50 of them. Each contains about 100 or more songs. So I am going folder by folder, song by song and converting and transferring. While it is a tedious process, I am happy that many of the songs I thought I would lose, will be saved.

In the transfer process there were some hiccups. I have come across a few songs that had issues and actually have areas of silence in the middle of the songs. Then there are those that were MP4 that I purchased on iTunes almost 20 years ago that show up, but they won’t convert. For these, I will probably reach out to my buddy Max (who seems to have a boatload of songs) to see if he can replace them….

On the bright side, there were many albums that I downloaded for various DJ jobs I had done in the past to get one song. Many of those albums were things I would never listen to and I always wound up skipping songs. All of those songs will not be transferring to my hard drive. I had an album of this weird traditional Irish music for a retirement party – that will all be deleted. I have another album of Hawaiian tracks for a Luau wedding I did – bye bye. I can also put all of the Christmas songs that were in the mix in a folder or on a drive that is nothing but holiday music.

It is taking me about 45 minutes to clear out one folder. Open the song – rename it – convert it. Once this is done, I will take on the bigger task of going through the 4 plastic totes I have downstairs with CDs in them and transfer the songs I want to keep to digital.

All this while living life … LOL