I went and did it again; I reached out and extended a "kind word" and [she] just latched onto me like a leach. Now how do I, without being rude, squash this. This is a basic female mistake ...and I suspect also made by a few males. You find a receptive ear, someone who might share your interest and concerns, and you immediately open the flood-gates and dump [it] all out at once. The immediate reaction has got to be one of apprehension; major red flag. Subtlety, people. It's all about restraint, moderation, and subtlety.

I'm finally getting around to digitizing the rest of my vinyl albums. This was a project I started over ten years ago and at the time it turned out to be more of a chore than I'd anticipated. To my chagrin, I found that a lot of those disc were in poor shape; the pops and scratches that aren't that noticeable when played on a turntable and monitored through the speakers simply ruined the track when digitized and listened to via the headphones of my mp3 player.

Then, why do the tapes (listened to via my old cassette walkman) sound so much better? Because I probably made the tape when the album was first bought and hadn't yet experienced any wear. So why not digitize from the tapes? Hmmmmm. Why not in deed! Why didn't I think about this before? All the tapes are in great shapes and regardless of use, they don't pick up any pops and scratches. Furthermore, with the advances in software since [then] this is proving to be a much easier task. Plus the additional computer speed and disk space [of my iBook] are added perks.

I'm renewed with excited about all this and hope I can get a significant amount of discs done before I get bored ...I have over 300 vinyl discs, 'though I'd never intended to digitize all of theml. I'm getting to listen to stuff I haven't heard in years because I rarely play vinyl albums or cassettes; I've gotten so use to the random access aspect of digital music. Anyway, I can finally get some use outta "Toast" (with its accompanying CD Spin Doctor software) which I bought and really didn't need since disc burning software is built in to the Mac's [OS X] software.