Floppy disks
Remember floppy disks? Hey, I thought they were awesome when they came out; I still remember the original floppy disks that were twice the size and were really and truly floppy. But life and technology move on, and here I was, stuck with over a hundred of those pesky floppy drives and no way to access the contents.
I was in the midst of hunting for any and all documents relating to the books I’m writing and these floppy disks covered most of our years in the Czech Republic and before. How could I in good conscience just toss them out (tempting though it was)?
Back to the Web I went, searching forums for converting floppy disks. The process was easy enough, but talk about tedious. I first had to change the settings on my computer to allow the old file formats. Luckily, I still have an old “tower” that has a floppy drive in it, or I’d have had a much tougher time.
I then had to insert each of the one hundred and five floppy disks, one by one, into the drive, open it up, open up each document in each directory, then save each document into the current format after creating new directories for them.
I’ll save you the gory details of the process and jump to the final results: eighty-three new directories on my hard drive; one-hundred-ninety-two individual files; and a long walk down nineteen years of memory lane. Think tedious, emotional, time-consuming, and totally utterly rewarding.
And yes, I got some incredibly useful material for the books, never mind ditching a hundred and five floppy disks I’d been carting around for far too many years.
Sonic Stage and all music
Just the mention of DRM (digital rights management) is enough to set me grinding my teeth these days. We have music that we bought legally, we have movies that we bought legally, and we have books on the Kindle that we bought legally, but we are trapped from copying them to our hard drives because of digital rights management.
What first slammed us on the DRM issues was a Sony Walkman mp3 player that I bought back in 2005. I was thrilled. It had great reviews, a huge memory (left the kids’ iPods in the dust), it looked great (red!), it was light and easy to keep around, and I couldn’t wait to use it. I happily installed the software that came with it, Sonic Stage, and merrily started copying all my CDs to it. Bad idea. Very bad idea.
It turned out that Chelsea needed to have the software on her machine if she wanted to listen to any of my songs; the software killed my screensaver and froze my computer regularly, and after a few years, Sony decided to stop supporting it.
All of my time spent copying my CDs to my hard drive was lost; all my time spent creating playlists was lost. I could no longer retrieve any of those songs or playlists on my hard drive. Frustrating? You bet.
Over a period of several years I scoured the Web looking for a solution. All I found was that a lot of other people had the same problem and were furious.
Finally when we arrived home we dug out all the CDs we’d packed away and Chelsea faithfully copied them onto our new portable hard drive, one by one, making sure to keep them in MP3 format. It took many hours.
So where’s the problem? We had given away or lost some of our original CDs and friends had loaned us CDs we no longer had. Some of the originals were too scratched to use. Those songs were now locked away on my Sonic Stage software.
Never being one to give up easily, I started checking forums once again. Much to my utter delight, I found a workaround in one of the forums. Alex graciously donated blank CDs to us; we copied all our songs one by one onto the CDs. The final step was to take the new CDs and copy them onto our portable hard drive with the rest of our music files.
It sounds simple, but I’ve realized that very little having to do with technology is simple these days. The software had a strange way of copying the songs, so I had to tally each song by hand as it came over. It didn’t copy sequentially, which meant I had to cross check each song against each album, to ensure we had all the songs on the albums.
Then we discovered that when Chelsea went to copy the songs from the CDs to the hard drive, the names hadn’t come over with them. That meant she had to hand-enter each artist, album, and song into the file after looking it up on the original Sonic Stage software.
The good news is that as of this writing we are most of the way through the project. We’ve got about twenty CDs completed, with perhaps a dozen left. When we’re absolutely certainly done, we are eliminating the software from each computer, and having a ritual burning of the software manual.