Problems with The Musical Computer

My bigger portable hard drive, the 250GB one that’s got all my jukebox-for-work music on it, is failing and has to be sent in for replacement.  Fortunately, this is covered by warranty so I’m not out $125, but it’s still vexatious that I have to mail the drive to a depot in McAllen, of all places, and then wait for them to send me a new one.

I discovered all this last night when I went to convert the 250GB drive to being my home-network backup host, moving the music to my older 100GB external drive to carry with me.  (Other people have portative organs; I have a portative hard drive.)  The big drive started throwing several kinds of I/O and read errors as I began moving the music around, and a fast diagnostic run said ”O HAI ur drive is made of FAIL DST long test.  Replace (y/n)?”  So I called Seagate customer service this morning, got an RMA number, and now I gotta scare up a suitable box to send it to McAllen.

Meantime, I’m salvaging as much as I can from the big drive (rather a lot of it, actually) and then I’ll re-rip what didn’t make the transfer, from the original CDs.  I don’t have any downloaded music at all, so even if the bigger drive dies completely before I get the transfers done, I haven’t lost anything really significant.

(And for you music geeks?  I’m moving the .WMA files from volume WURLITZER to volume ROCK-OLA.)

In other musical news, I’ve finally worked out a method to rip my 78s to CD without having to beg or buy a turntable that still goes to 78.  Credit where it’s due, N5RED was the one who told me the answer months ago, but I dismissed his solution as too difficult.  Turned out it wasn’t really too difficult, but it did have to wait until I stumbled across an audio editing package that would allow me to alter both the speed and pitch of a recording.

So the final solution became:  record the 78s at 45, which sounds lugubrious while you’re doing it, then run the recording through WavePad at 173.3% (the mathematical ratio of 45 to 78), then feed the intermediate file through an audio spectral noise reduction filter to get rid of the surface hiss.  The actual file processing takes only a couple of minutes, and the final recording quality is startlingly good.

I’ll do the creams.  Fnord.