Grand Rip Railroad

Recently, our Director here at French-Harrison Consolidated Living Corporation (my wife) went to our Deputy Director of Research and Development(me) with a new initiative: reduce the numerous, unsightly and hard to access compact music discs scattered about our headquarters (our house). The Deputy Director suggested we digitize all this hard media into a more accessible form such as MP3. That is when the Deputy Director of Information Technology(me again) was called in and tasked with sifting through and converting hundreds of songs to MP3s and then organizing them on the networked media server.

Making this even more painful was the fact that a major portion had already been converted in an shamefully ad hoc manner; some were in OGG, some in MP4, many in MP3 format with depressingly low bit rates. All these had to be reconverted to the new standard. To speed things up 3 optical drives were requisitioned and installed in a machine for parallel conversion. Despite 3 conversion pipelines this turned into major time commitment.

I love technology, but not as much as you(music), you see... But I STILL love technology... Always and forever.