January 29, 2014:

J.S. Bach, “Four Concertos for Harpsichord and Orchestra,” Chamber Orchestra of the Saar (though it’s misspelled as “Sarre” here; I know it’s actually the Saar because I have other albums where it’s spelled correctly and has the same conductor).

Very nice stuff. There’s a track or two with some minor surface noise, as if there was a bit of fluff in the way for a few seconds, but I don’t think it’s worth re-recording. It’s very minor.

January 29, 2014:

“Two- and Three-Part Inventions,” all thirty of them, performed by George Malcolm.

Perhaps the Bachiest of all Bach. Lots of fun. Very clean copy. Audacity did crash once during the editing, but recovered just fine.

January 30, 2014:

George Carlin’s “Class Clown” is now added to my collection. Most of it holds up beautifully; a few bits, mostly about Vietnam, haven’t aged well.

I don’t know where I got this album, but I don’t think I bought it new. I played it a few times, but not for decades. It’s in beautiful condition, though, and the copy’s just about flawless.

Firesign Theatre’s “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” on the other hand, has a bad scratch on Side 2 that renders it unplayable. Oh, most of it’s fine, but there’s this one stretch, maybe twenty seconds, that sticks and skips and… well, I’ll be buying this one on CD. (Fortunately, it’s available and not expensive.)

January 31, 2014:

Hey, I forgot to list one! “Music and Songs from HAIR, the Tribal Love Rock Musical,” by Dave Wintour and Pat Whitmore.

What a piece of crap.

This was a bunch of guys simply recording nine of the songs from “Hair” and selling it as an album. No one involved had any connection with the show.

They didn’t do a great job — as in, they didn’t even get all the lyrics right.

I picked this up at a yard sale, under the mistaken impression from a very quick glance that it was the London cast album. Got it home, realized my mistake, never played it until now.

It was an easy transfer, and it’s short, or I might not have bothered. Did it about a week ago.

And next will be today’s addition.

January 31, 2014:

Next, specifically, is the dreaded “Jazz Guitar Bach,” by Andre Benichou and His Well-Tempered Three.

This was one of the rare misfires from Nonesuch. I have no idea who Andre Benichou was, but I can tell you something he wasn’t, and that’s a good guitarist. Oh, he hits all the right notes and stays on the beat, but it’s utterly drab, colorless playing, with all the emotional content of an accountant’s resume.

It also isn’t all Bach; two pieces are of dubious attribution, and another is definitely not by J.S. Bach, but was found in his daughter’s notebook, which was apparently enough to get it included.

I know some people think of Bach’s music as mathematical and emotionless, but they’re wrong, as lots of musicians, Walter/Wendy Carlos among them, have demonstrated. Hell, this guy’s own back-up band gets some feeling into the music, only to have the lead guitar squelch it.

About the only excuse I can make for M’sieu Benichou is that it was 1965, and Messrs. Hendrix and Clapton had not yet demonstrated to the world what can be done with an electric guitar. Hell, there’s one piece on here that Jethro Tull performed on “Living in the Past,” where Ian Anderson got far more feeling into it with his flute than M.
Benichou does with his “jazz” ensemble.

It’s a short album, just under half an hour in all, and I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad one, but at least it’s done now.

January 27, 2014:

Having finished up all the medieval stuff, here’s a complete change of pace: “How to Tell Corn Fairies When You See ‘Em,” written and read by Carl Sandburg. This 1961 album was the second of two records Sandburg made of reading from Rootabaga Stories; I’ll be getting to the other soon.

Alas, this is scratched and worn, with several skips and sticks; it took a significant amount of work to get a useable copy. If it were available on CD or MP3 I’d have just bought a copy, but it’s not.

The result isn’t good, but it’s better than nothing.

These two records were my mother’s; she bought them new, and when my sibs and I were kids we played them to death.

I don’t think Sandburg is generally remembered much anymore, though the book Rootabaga Stories is still in print. The stories originated as bedtime stories for his daughters. They’re strange and dreamlike, but I loved them when I was little, so I wanted to keep them no matter how crappy the condition of the record.

January 27, 2014:

My copy of “Johann Sebastian Bach: Lute Music,” by Walter Gerwig, is trashed; I don’t know when or how, but it all sounds like crap.

Fortunately, it’s one of the few Nonesuch albums that’s obtainable elsewhere. It was originally a European album, and that European orginal was released on CD in 1999, and is now available for download.

So I downloaded it, and tossed my original vinyl and the Audacity copy.

(I’ve now finished up all the Nonesuch stuff except for half a dozen albums of J.S. Bach stuff. Now I’m working on those.)

January 28, 2014:

I said, “I’ve now finished up all the Nonesuch stuff except for half a dozen albums of J.S. Bach stuff. Now I’m working on those.”

For example, “Sonatas for ‘Cello and Harpsichord,” with Andre Navarra on cello and Ruggero Gerlin at the harpsichord. No problems at all in making the MP3 (there’s a little surface noise in spots, nothing serious), but for some reason iTunes decided it was two different albums, and it took some arguing to convince it that no, all eleven tracks go on one album.

This is nice music. Comparing this with the lute album, I see why the lute fell out of favor; the cello is much more pleasant to listen to.

January 29, 2014:

Finished up “Rootabaga Stories,” the Carl Sandburg spoken-word stuff. More weird, hyper-American fairytales.

There are a couple of things that really date this material. One is that two stories feature a character named Wingtip the Spic.

And then there’s the village where they bake clowns in ovens. I suspect that didn’t come across anywhere near as creepy before the Holocaust.

The stories are from the 1920s, I think. The album’s from 1958.

There were places the needle stuck; took a couple of tries and some careful editing to get a useable copy, and there’s still lots of crackling. But hey, I have the stories.

Now back to Bach. And comedy, and one or two weirdnesses.

January 20, 2014:

Okay, back to classical — “Eighteenth-Century Italian Harpsichord Music,” by Luciano Sgrizzi. Nonesuch, of course.

There are a couple of faint scratches, and just enough warping that I had to cue it up by hand instead of using the turntable’s automatic systems, but mostly it’s clean and clear.

Audacity crashed twice while I was transferring it, though.

Still, it’s done, and it’s good.

January 21, 2014:

Followed by “Quartet Music of the 17th & 18th Centuries,” by the Stuyvesant String Quartet, 1966.

Don’t know what to say about it.

January 22, 2014:

And now “Baroque Music for Recorders,” by the Concentus Musicus of Denmark, 1965.

This is an interesting one because it starts out with a dozen assorted “dances” — honestly, some I think are too short to actually dance to, being under forty seconds — which are simple and straightforward, and then it gradually works through fancier stuff until it finishes up with a sonata for recorder, oboe, violin, harpsichord, and bass by Fasch that’s quite complex and beautiful.

I ran into a problem trying to MP3ize it — there’s a gap in the data, for some reason, between the third and fourth movements of a Handel sonata, so that it crashed repeatedly when I tried to do that bit. I eventually wound up working backward from the end of the album for everything after the bad spot, and that worked — the missing chunk is from the three-second break between tracks, not the actual music, so I was able to work around it and just not transfer those three seconds.

Don’t know how that gap happened. I get an error message, “Missing data,” when I try to play that stretch, and then Audacity freezes and I have to reboot it.

January 23, 2014:

Julie thinks I’m insane to bother copying this one: “Environments Disc 1,” by Syntonic Research, 1970.

One side is thirty minutes of seashore ambiance; the other side is chirping birds.

Audacity crashed the first time I tried, but the second attempt worked fine.

January 24, 2014:

“Four Centuries of Music for the Harp.” Back to Nonesuch. Nice stuff.

January 25, 2014:

“In A Medieval Garden.” Which is nominally by a lute ensemble, but in fact some pieces have recorders, krummhorns, viols, or even percussion in the lead. It’s a surprisingly varied collection, really, with a couple of fun, bouncy numbers mixed in with the more contemplative stuff.

It’s deliberately mostly secular music, from the 12th through the 16th centuries.

I like this one — but it’s really short; only about twenty-eight minutes for both sides together.

January 26, 2014:

Josquin des Prez’s “Missa Ave Maris Stella” and Four Motets, by the University of Illinois Chamber Choir.

I went through a brief period of fascination with Josquin des Prez, and how he fell between medieval and renaissance styles; this was one of the two albums I bought during that period. (The other is coming up soon.)

It’s lovely, but seems pretty conventional compared to the “Medieval Garden” record.

No problems recording or editing it.

January 26, 2014: (From this point on it wasn’t unusual to do more than one in a day.)

“Voices of the Middle Ages,” by Capella Antiqua of Munich. Well-done but largely undistinguished church vocal music from the 13th through 15th centuries.

I had a weird problem with this one — Audacity crashed repeatedly when I tried to play back track 8, “Der Tag ist so freudenreich,” after converting tracks 1-7 to MP3. So I started working back-to-front, from track 20 backward, and when I did it that way track 8 worked just fine. Audacity can be very quirky.

There’s some surface noise on this one; I played it a few times when it was new, and not on a really good system. Mostly it’s fine, though.

January 27, 2014:

And now I’ve squared away the other Josquin Desprez album, “Chansons, Frottole & Instrumental Pieces.” It’s a rather scattered collection, but good stuff.

Note: I welcome comments. If they don’t appear immediately, it means you’ve never posted to this blog before and I need to clear you.

December 29, 2013:

“Disney’s Children’s Favorites, Volume II,” by Larry Groce and the Disneyland Children’s Sing-Along Chorus. Twenty-nine kid songs, and I find myself wondering what was on Vol. I, because most of the classics are here.

No problems with the transfer, really, though Audacity did crash once during the editing and needed to be rebooted. The LP (from 1979) seems to have been in perfect condition. I’m pretty sure we did play it, because I remember two of the three originals Larry Groce wrote for it, but there’s no detectible wear at all.

It’s kid songs; what else to say? It’s got some of the same songs as the other albums I’ve mentioned here, such as “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” but a bunch that I didn’t have, as well.

And that’s the last of the only-for-kids records. There are two more borderline cases, Carl Sandburg reading his Rootabaga Stories, but I think those are suitable for adults, too.

Still more Bach, comedy, baroque/medieval, and miscellaneous to go.

December 31,2013:

I said, “And that’s the last of the only-for-kids records.”

Actually, it’s not; I missed one I’ll get to later. For now I did another comedy album instead — “Welcome to the LBJ Ranch,” a not-very-funny thing where politicians’ recorded answers were used as replies to interview questions that were definitely not the ones they were originally answering. (E.g., Eisenhower is asked, “How many Americans do you think actually voted for Senator Goldwater?” and answers, “About seventy.”)

The album may be best remembered now because Frank Frazetta did the cover caricatures.

It was in excellent condition, because frankly, it’s not anything you’d bother playing more than once or twice. (By contrast, both my copies of Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family” had been played to death.)

So it’s been added to my digital collection for its curiosity value.

January 19, 2014:

“Hair — An American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” the original cast
recording.

That’s the original cast, i.e., the off-Broadway New York Shakespeare Festival cast. The show got reworked pretty drastically before it reached Broadway, so the songs on this 1967 album don’t overlap the ’69 Broadway version all that much. Here we have “Exanaplanetooch,” and “The Climax,” and “Going Down,” but no “The Flesh Failures” or “3-5-0-0” or “Sodomy.”

It overlaps “DisinHAIRited” some, but again, not all that much. And even on the songs you’ve heard elsewhere, the arrangements are often different.

Honestly, it’s more a curiosity than anything else. But I have it, and now it’s in MP3 form. I had to re-record “Air” because of a skip, and there’s some other noise here and there; the second try it didn’t skip, so it’s all good.

“Hair” is so very much a product of its time! It’s weird listening to it now.

More MP3-making:

December 18, 2013:

Took a break from the Nonesuch music and recorded an album that’s entitled either “Peter and the Wolf” or “Favorite Children’s Stories,” depending which label you believe, by the Rocking Horse Players and Orchestra. It’s six stories — well, five stories and an idiotic song — combining music and recitation.

They’re pretty lame, really.

The stories are “Peter and the Wolf,” “The Golden Goose,” “The Brave Tin Soldier” (which they consistently call “The Brave Tin Soldiers” on the sleeve, for no discernible reason), “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” and “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” The album closes with a piece of idiocy called “Ozzie the Ostrich,” a song which manages to be inaccurate, misleading, and downright stupid while apparently attempting to be educational — it claims that no one knows where the ostrich lays his eggs, for example.

There are other minor stupidities here and there, such as the actress reading the part of the shoemaker’s wife not knowing how to pronounce “waistcoat,” but it’s mostly a reasonably professional production.

Oddly, it has no copyright notice or other legalities, and I know enough pre-1976 copyright law (it’s from 1966) to know that means it’s in the public domain, whether deliberately or not.

I don’t think I ever played it; it was a yard sale acquisition, and by the time I got it the kids were probably too old for it.

It’s got a moderate amount of surface noise, but no serious problems.

That leaves two more children’s records. Or four, depending on how you look at it.

December 20, 2013:

“Puff the Magic Dragon and Other Songs Children Request,” by the Richard Wolfe Children’s Chorus. 1967, and pretty much what the title says, with classics like “On Top of Spaghetti” and “The Little White Duck.” I got this at a yard sale for fifty cents (the price is still on it) circa 1988-1990, and if I remember correctly I bought it to prove to Kiri that “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmitt” was a real song and not something I’d made up.

We played the first side once, so she could hear that song. I’m pretty sure we never played the second side at all, or either side again.

It’s kinda scratched up; it took two tries to get a complete, non-skipping version of the title track, though the rest made it in a single pass. It’s scratched, though, more than worn, so it’s more listenable than some others I’ve dealt with — between scratches it’s still clear. And except for the skips in the first track none of the scratches are all that bad, there are just a lot of them.

It’s also really short; both sides together only come to maybe 25 minutes. [I’ve noticed this was a recurring theme — I seem to have complained any time an album had a playing time under 35 minutes.]

The liner notes are unfortunate; someone was trying to be hip and failing: “Puff.. is ‘the most’ with the young set now.”

Anyway, it’s a decent collection of kid songs, sung by a children’s chorus that’s decent and doesn’t try too hard.

December 25, 2013: [Yes, I did one on Christmas Day.]

“The Majesty of the Luneburg Organ,” Prof. Michael Schneider playing J.S. Bach.

I think this was the first classical album I ever owned; it’s from the late 1960s. Well, this edition– the original recording was 1958, this is a re-release. I bought it new.

It’s got some minor wear and surface noise, but is mostly fine.

Still more LPs…

December 3, 2013:

“Baroque Fanfares and Sonatas for Brass,” by the London Brass Players, and “Masters of the High Baroque,” by the Collegium Musicum Saarensis. More Nonesuch budget classics. The latter at least isn’t all trumpets — more strings, with cello or even recorder (which I know isn’t strings) playing lead.

No problems with the first one, but “Masters” has some minor scratches, and a bit of fluff got on the stylus and messed up Pergolesi’s Sinfonia for ‘Cello and Continuo in F major badly enough that I re-recorded it.

Still lots more baroque and medieval stuff in the remaining 34 albums, including lots of Bach. (My romantic period came later, after I’d switched to CDs.)

I’ve divided everything I haven’t yet transferred up into categories, by the way, just to see what’s there. Baroque/medieval is the largest, but there’s still a bunch of comedy, children’s albums, and the dreaded “miscellaneous.”

But I have at least one more baroque trumpet album that I’ll probably do next.

Oh, yeah — coming up with cover art to plug into iTunes has been a challenge for some of these. They’re all out of print, after all, and never had CD releases. For two of these last four I couldn’t find a decent image anywhere, and wound up scanning my own covers, which was a pain and not worth the effort, but I get obsessive about this stuff. On “Masters of the High Baroque” in particular I couldn’t find an image that didn’t have a damn price sticker on it. (And going by the prices on those stickers, they were yard sale finds.)

December 12, 2013:

I said, “But I have at least one more baroque trumpet album that I’ll probably do next.”

I did. It’s actually one of Nonesuch’s earliest albums, called simply “The Baroque Trumpet.” Various artists, various composers, from 1964.

(I skipped a week because I was replacing a bad hard drive and backing up all my music. That takes awhile.)

Anyway, it’s good stuff, more varied than some of the ones I’ve done. Side One had some minor surface noise; Side Two was pretty near perfect.

Continuing…

November 24, 2013:

“Six Sonatas for Flute and Harpsichord,” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal and Robert Veyron-LaCroix.

Light classical; pleasant, not terribly involving. I think I’d only ever played it twice, and it’s in excellent condition; the only noise was a faint scratch at the end of the second movement of Sonata #4. Other than that it sounds as if it could have been digital to begin with.

No problems with the transfer.

I actually have a lot more by JS Bach, not sure if there’s any more by CPE Bach or any of his brothers; I’d forgotten just how big a Bach fan I was for a couple of years. Also Josquin Desprez and assorted medieval stuff.

The classical and medieval music are probably two-thirds of the remaining albums; next biggest group after that is comedy. I’m debating whether I should just get all the Bill Cosby material on CD; it’s cheap enough that way, and would be stereo, where the albums are monaural, but loses some of the sentimental value. I think I’ll see what sort of shape they’re in before deciding.

(It’s Cosby’s first four albums, all bought new pretty much as soon as they were available; my mother was a huge Cosby fan back then.)

Classical/medieval, comedy, then more children’s albums, and a couple of oddities (e.g., Environments I). Oh, and some off-Broadway material from “Hair.” No more soundtracks or pop/rock or Broadway.

I’ve pulled all the albums off the shelves, and stacked them on the floor across from the turntable; stack’s maybe five inches. I’m getting there.

November 25, 2013:

“16 Sonatas for Harpsichord,” Domenico Scarlatti, performed by Luciano Sgrizzi. I think I only played this one once; really, I don’t feel a great need to hear a lot of harpsichord sonatas as a general thing. Nice to have them available, though, and the MP3s came out really well.

December 1, 2013:

Still on my classical binge — “A Baroque Trumpet Recital” and “The Art of the Baroque Trumpet,” both late-’60s Nonesuch albums. Not much to say about them. I hit one bad skip, but amazingly was able to successfully edit it out of the recording.

More baroque still to come.

Continuing the comments on copying LPs to MP3:

November 11, 2013:

“Mel Brooks’ Greatest Hits.”

That’s not what it says on the front of the sleeve — there it says “Mel Brooks High Anxiety.” But the spine and label and so on all make it clear it’s “greatest hits.”

Side 1 is all from “High Anxiety,” but Side 2 has “Springtime for Hitler” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz” and all the other classics.

It’s in beautiful condition, and I got a flawless copy with no problem. I’m very pleased to have it!

November 13, 2013:

“Irish Songs of Rebellion,” by the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. This is a 1969 Everest/Tradition re-release of their 1959 album “The Rising of the Moon.”

One of the weird things about it is that as well as changing the title, they swapped the sides — Side 2 of this version was Side A back in ’59, and vice versa.

It’s a pretty good album, with Patrick Clancy’s original liner notes providing fairly detailed information on each song. The arrangements and harmonies are very simple

I’ve heard other versions of some of these songs; Peter Paul & Mary did a couple, and I admit I like the PPM versions better. Still, the Clancy versions are probably more authentic.

It’s a very clean copy; didn’t have any trouble making it.

November 18, 2013:

I just wasted far too much time tracking down credits for “Happy Birthday and Songs for Every Holiday,” a Disneyland Records collection from 1964 that’s mostly repackaged Mickey Mouse Club material. It skimps badly on crediting the songwriters and performers.

I don’t know whether this had ever been played before; it sounded brand-new. It had been opened, but still has the original shrink-wrap and is in virtually perfect condition.

No idea where I got it. At some point in the ’80s or early ’90s I apparently acquired half a dozen kids’ records that I don’t recall ever playing; I’m guessing they were either gifts or a yard sale find.

November 19, 2013:

Added to the MP3 collection: “The Baroque Lute,” by Walter Gerwin. Released by Nonesuch in 1969, three years after Gerwin died, five years after the album was recorded.

It’s not bad. Lute music doesn’t have as much tonal variety as some other instruments, but it’s still pleasant to listen to. This is three suites, one each by Bach, Buxtehude, and Pachelbel.

There’s some faint wear on Side Two, in the Pachelbel section; mostly it’s excellent condition. The software did crash once during editing, but I’ve learned to save everything to disc frequently, so I was able to pick up where I’d left off without too much trouble.

November 21, 2013:

Tonight’s prize: “Occupation: Foole,” by George Carlin.

Some very funny stuff, some dated Nixon jokes. Well worth having in my collection.

Most of it was just fine, as far as condition, but there’s a scratch/skip in “Cute Little Farts” that rendered it completely unplayable, so I bought a new copy of that one cut off Amazon for 99 cents.

More to come…

Continuing the comments on copying LPs to MP3:

November 6, 2013:

Today I polished off “German Drinking Songs,” Everest/Tradition TR-2076. Don’t know the date. No idea who the singers and musicians are. It says “Recorded live in Munich,’ and nothing else about its provenance.

It’s a really crappy job of packaging — the sleeve lists two cuts that aren’t actually on the record, a bunch of the German titles are misspelled*, and there’s absolutely no useful information. No artists, no copyright, no composers, nothin’.

I tried to look it up, and discovered that Everest had a history of sleazy behavior, such as issuing unauthorized editions that they didn’t pay royalties on, so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Anyway, the album is probably from somewhere in the period 1958-1963, and it has a bunch of classic Oktoberfest music, not all of it actually drinking songs — or even songs, really, as there are a couple of instrumentals among the twenty brief numbers. There are four songs about the Rhine all in a row, followed by two about Rüdesheim; why were people in Munich singing those?

(The cuts range from 36 seconds to just over three minutes; they jammed twenty songs/pieces into a thirty-minute album. The cover says twenty-two, but it lies.)

Side Two is pretty much all Munich-related drinking songs, including a couple of classics — you may not recognize the title “In München Steht Ein Hofbräuhaus,” but you’ve almost certainly heard it; in virtually any Hollywood movie with an Oktoberfest scene, it’s the song playing in the background.

I don’t know where I got my copy. It’s in reasonably good shape — no warping or skips, but a fair bit of surface noise. The transfer went smoothly.

==

* Whoever typeset the album cover left out all the umlauts (of which
there were many), transcribed the ess-tsetts as B’s, and reversed
several vowel combinations.

November 10, 2013:

Here’s one that was hard to catalog: “Walt Disney’s Babes in Toyland,” which is not the soundtrack album. There was no soundtrack album; this is the closest approximation, but while it’s all the songs from the movie, it’s not the versions that are in the film. It doesn’t feature Annette or Tommy Sands or Ray Bolger, though it does have Ann Jillian and Ed Wynn singing their bits from the film.

It’s very confusing; why did they do it this way? Also, several sources online say the record’s from 1961 because the film was released in December of ’61, but the album very clearly says “Copyright 1964 Walt Disney Productions” on the cover.

Actually, the singers on the album are much better than the ones in the film. (Which I have on DVD, so I’m not relying on fifty-year-old memories.) And it’s a clearer recording. Some of the songs are expanded, also an improvement.

Anyway. Got a nice clean transfer, though there’s some minor surface noise in spots.

I may have mentioned here [i.e., on SFF Net, where I’d posted about watching the DVD] that it’s a pretty lousy movie, which it is, but one thing I didn’t mention because it didn’t really register until I listened to the nice clear lyrics on this version is how staggeringly, mind-bogglingly sexist some bits are. In particular, the song “Just A Toy” is simply appalling even for the time.

Other than that, though, it’s cheesy fun.

More to come…

Five years ago we were getting ready to move from our house in Gaithersburg to somewhere closer to my wife’s job. We had lived in the house on Solitaire Court for twenty-two years, and raised our kids there, so we had accumulated a lot of stuff — a lot of stuff. We didn’t realize how much until we had to clean the place up for potential buyers.

So we set out to declutter the place. We didn’t want to take all that stuff with us. We threw out vanloads of junk. I sorted out my books and comic books and so on, and started weeding out the stuff I didn’t want.

And I looked at the piles and piles of stuff in various obsolete (or nearly so) media, and decided something had to be done about it. I didn’t want to have LPs and cassette tapes and CDs and reel-to-reel tapes, VHS and DVDs, and so on. This is the twenty-first century, and all that stuff could be consolidated onto digital media, which would save huge amounts of space. Eliminating the multiple players would simplify matters, too.

Converting it all was far too big a job to be done before we moved. I was able to thin out hundreds of duplicates of one kind or another (books in multiple editions, LPs I also had on CD, etc.), but most of it got hauled to the new house, and I’ve been working on it ever since.

Ripping all the 500 or so CDs to disk was relatively quick and easy, though about half a dozen got screwed up and need to be re-done. (“Need” is the correct tense; I haven’t done it yet.) I disposed of a couple of our CD players (though I admit to keeping two). Then I started on the phonograph records, which required installing the appropriate software (Audacity) and hooking my stereo and turntable up to my computer.

It takes a long time to copy 450+ albums and a few dozen singles, 78s, and other oddities to MP3. I finally finished a couple of months ago. Then after moving my turntable into dead storage in the basement I hooked up my tape deck and started on the cassettes; I only have just over a hundred of those. I’m in the middle of that, with the reel-to-reel tapes still to go when the cassettes are done.

(I’ve made some progress in other media besides sound; I have one more long box of comic books left to trade in at Beyond Comics, out of the 14,000 comics I started with, and about 300 assorted books have been replaced with ebooks on my Kindle. And all the VHS tapes are gone, replaced with DVDs or Blu-Ray, even if I had to burn them to DVD myself.)

Anyway, as I’ve worked my way through all this stuff, I’ve been posting about it on my old SFF Net newsgroup. Not many people read there. Not many people read here, either, but this blog is easier to link to, and generally more permanent and more accessible, so I’ve decided to copy edited versions of some of those newsgroup posts to this blog. I didn’t keep copies of the early ones, though they’re all somewhere in the SFF Net archives; the ones I do have are all from the last few months, when I’d already finished all the ordinary pop/rock/folk music I had on LP, and had gotten to the stuff in my collection I hadn’t played in decades.

Here’s the first entry, from a post dated November 2, 2013:

National Lampoon’s “Lemmings” is now squared away on my computers in MP3 form. Condition was excellent, transfer went very smoothly.

This brought back a lot of memories; I saw “Lemmings” live at McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ when it first toured in 1973. Back then nobody knew who John Belushi and Chevy Chase were, but after watching the show we knew they were pretty damn funny. Chase’s Hell’s Angel routine was a lot funnier live than on the album because so much of it was visual; it involved the sort of pratfall he became famous for a couple of years later on “Saturday Night Live.” (He splashed beer on the audience in the process.) And there’s no explanation on the album of what’s going on in the middle of “Lonely At the Bottom,” Belushi’s Joe Cocker parody — he fell down while singing and couldn’t get up, and the band stopped playing and walked away until he managed to get back on his feet. On the record it just sounds like a bunch of grunting and gasping.

There was a lot that didn’t make it onto the album — the entire first act, for one thing, and also “Pull the Triggers, Niggers,” because they’d already put a shorter version of that song on “Radio Dinner.”

(Some other stuff on “Radio Dinner,” such as “Deteriorata,” was also in the first act.)

Anyway. Funny stuff, and most of it has held up fairly well, though “Papa Was A Running Dog Lackey of the Bourgeoisie” is kind of dated.

More when I get around to it.