Cosmic pop culture reference coincidence of the day: as I was flipping channels, I briefly stopped at Star World, which was showing adverts for
About A Boy, the
Hugh Grant movie based on Nick Hornby's novel, due to screen on Star Movies sometime soon. Flipped to the next channel, E! Entertainment, which was showing an installment of
101 Reasons The 90's Ruled. I was just in time to catch Reason No. 46: "Stammer Time:
Hugh Grant Becomes Star". Freaky, eh? I think I'm officially psychic, though too bad that my psychic abilities don't seem to have any practical uses at the moment.
High Fidelity music geek moment of the day: a while ago Jamal broke his tape of Weezer's
Green Album and asked me to tape him another one. He even supplied a blank tape. Now the thing is, he gave me a 60 minute tape, and that album's running time doesn't even reach 30 minutes - just enough for one side. So the question was, how to fill the other side? Actually I knew the answer to that: I had an assortment of b-sides at the ready. Going about the actual taping process: now
that was the tricky part.
Here's the thing: I used to make loads of compilation tapes until about a year ago, when I got a cable connection. Before then, my method of taping was to draw on a variety of sources: other tapes, CDs, and mp3s straight from my PC. I'd record from tapes in the double deck hi-fi, then hook up a CD player to the stereo to record from CDs because the hi-fi's CD player was busted, and then plug the line-in/line-out cable to the PC so I could record mp3s.
Problem: the hi-fi and computer are too far apart for the cables. Previously this wasn't problematic, as I could just roll the computer table as close as possible to the immobile hi-fi. But now it's not viable, as the internet cable doesn't reach that far and I can't take it out for extended periods. So I had to cross out mp3s from my mix tape source list.
Second problem: I need mp3 sources for this Weezer tape, to fill in side B. My CD player is supposed to play mp3s, so I copied them onto a rewritable CD. But for some reason, it wouldn't play the CD-RW. Gah. So I had to convert the mp3s into a proper music CD, and then use the newly-burned CD as a source. Worked fine save for several times when the bastard CD player would suddenly cut out in the middle of songs, necessitating me to go back and re-record.
What does this all mean? It seems that, for me, mix tape compiling has become more trouble than it's worth. It looks like I'll have to eliminate the tape element (both as source and target), use CDs as the target, and download any source songs that may be on tape.
Here's another wee pop culture coincidence: in relation to yesterday's occurence, I was looking up
High Fidelity on www.imdb.com when I found a quote from the movie, basically talking about the difficulty of creating the perfect compilation tape - and as it turns out, I just experienced first-hand exactly what that quote meant. Well, to be honest it was more of a struggle from a technical standpoint as opposed to trying to figure out the appropriate contents. And given the technical convenience offered by CDs...it just might be time to say goodbye to the mix tape...
