I’ve been collecting music for the last 30 years, but most of my collection is on vinyl, the best way to listen to music. The time has come, however, to transfer my collection to my computer. Is there any way to can digitise the music instead of buying it again?
It’s really amazing how much music we tend to collect over the years, whether it’s on cassette, vinyl or CD. I still have stacks of CD boxes lying around the house, even though I don’t listen to that music any more. It’s almost a pity you can’t return the CDs back when you don’t want to listen to them any more, and trade them for new music.
Anyway, back to the question at hand, how do you convert your vinyl records to a digital format? There are hardware solutions that can help, record players that can plug into your USB port and help you convert your music into MP3s. One such device is the Audio-Technica AT-LP120 USB Record Turntable that’s currently on sale at Buy.com for around $200. It includes a software package called Audicity which will let you create MP3s from the records that you play. It even includes a pre-amp that lets you connect it to your standard sound system.
Just keep in mind that you should be tagging and labelling your new MP3s are you create them; otherwise it’s easy to end up with a huge collection of music that you can’t find your way around. Better to take the hit up front.
A couple of weeks ago, I opened a talk for the Isle of Man Social Media Club entitled Enabling Social Media for Internal Communities. The speaker was Mr Chris Gledhill from PDMS who gave a talk about an off-the-self collaboration package called Microsoft Sharepoint and presented a case study around his organisation’s use of the product.
Here are the slides from the presentation:
I hope you find them interesting.
It’s that time of the month again, yes, Third Thursday is here and it’s time for the Isle of Man Social Media Club to get together to catch up. In case you’ve never come before, this is an informal gathering for people interested in Social Media. If you’re have a passing interest in Social Media, if you make a living from Social Networks, if you’re interested in learning how you could apply it in your daily work or personal life; please come and join us, meet some other enthusiasts and share your stories. It’s an opportunity to share any lessons learnt, hear about new technologies and pick up new hints and tips to try online.
We tend to talk about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, FourSquare, Buzz and whatever new networks are on the horizon. It’s at our usual venue: Paparazzi at 12:30 on Thursday 15th July. Come along … and bring a friend.
Camille’s laptop arrived yesterday, a brand new Lenovo to replace the old laptop which has been giving her trouble. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t that expensive a box, but it’s amazing what sort of spec you can get in a cheap machine nowadays. It has 4Gb of RAM, a decent processor and a 320Gb hard disk. It also comes with an integrated webcam and everything else you expect from a modern machine.
I haven’t quite looked at what warranty it comes with, but it’s always important to keep in mind that bad things can happen to your laptop. It could get stolen, the screen could break or hey, one of the babies could pull it down onto the ground. So it’s always worth getting some laptop warranty for it. Oh, and if you get it from laptopwarranty.org, you can get a 10% discount by using promo code “tenoff”. Check it out!
Now, to migrate all her things from her old computer to her new one …
What plugin do you use to display your photos? One of my favourites is one called NextGEN Gallery Plugin which lets you upload and store photos and even display them on a slide show on your blog. The plugin allows … Continue reading → Continue reading →
