Yeah! Did that once, many years back. took a couple weeks. Used a ripper program that went out on the net and got all the metadata, saved to a HD (now on the third one). Put the CDs in Logic cases (no-wear), recycled the jewelboxes.

Over time, started to drop album folders into VLC, save the playlists, at ur fingertips.

FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.

With a long, varied list of select internet radio stations, you can choose what genre (or special weekly show) you want to listen to at the moment. Picked by people, not algorithms. Keep a playlist of the stations you like best, startup your player (like VLC) with the list, and pick the one you’re in the mood for.

Or you could just collect mp3s locally for choosier days, dump a bunch of them into VLC, listen to them in album or random order. In either case, at no cost.

I’d say that a vacant home - any place (lots of them) where the homeless are dying in the streets of hypothermia - is owned by a garbage human.

IMO owning an unoccupied house thats off-market, or prohibitively-priced is probably a gambling chip.

IF there are ANY families in the same county that are homeless, it should begin being taxed as a gambling-chip. Sell-it very soon or it may used for a free shelter for however it remains unoccupied by the owner.

An apartment-building owner WHO LIVES IN the building year-around might be in accord. (My own GG-ma ran a boarding-home for income after her husband died.)

Needs discussion. I’m more concerned for kids -never being able- to buy a home. “Owner-built”, no problem.

It’s my opinion that housing is so basic a need that no house should be allowed to use for a gambling chip.

The ‘housing market’ needs to be broken in favor of individual ownership. (For many, speculation has driven ownership out of reach.)

Only individuals may purchase individual homes, and must agree to occupy them as their primary and only residences until they sell and vacate them. (Live-in landlords included, e.g. boarders.)

As part of the deal, they must first find another individual buyer (under the same terms) for their present home.

(Futher stipluations needed, but none that permit violation of the above principle. )

The how part.

Sounds about right … -some- of the older ICs are pretty rugged. OTOH, things I wonder about on the below-freezing side (colder things shrink) … include ROMs? Larger capacitors? Modern high-density RAM? FPGA? And then there’s water condensation (rust?) water freezing? (might even damage traces on PC boards)… (Wonder if there’s an archive of chip datesheets online?)

Desperate strategy they’re hoping will fool some of the people some of the time.

Trusting complete strangers with highly personal information is never a good idea. Even if they promise to take good care of it, before or after they’ve already got your money.

With all those noises moving parts inside, playing an OLD machine felt like tickling a hippo.

Ur so right! Diffy-Q has its uses, but analog was too advanced for us to grok so we had to settle for it. Newton ‘discovered’ gravity, and calculus, then found out how useful calc was!

Non-linear? Hella faster! Nature went with analog long ago. No analog, no music!

Glad to hear that! Yep he’s got a sense of humor -and- knows his stuff.

Oh well … at least we’ve still got Popular Mechanics.

Gnome purists would be very offended tho…

Safer to try every keypress to find out how to get to the terminal.

Guess not, Gnome desktops have nothing on them.

It’s a great service. I found several of his expertly-created 78 tunes on there that I hadn’t heard in decades. (Some scarce stuff is almost never NOT available on 33 or 45rpm)

Another reason: Some people get deeper into multiple pieces of music because they like to compare performances of them. Fidelity doesn’t matter a whole lot. You want to compare how some bands or singers performed a (non-hit) song recorded in the 1930s or 1950s. You listen around the fidelity. People in the 1950s made million-selling hits everyone heard on AM radio or 45s. Fidelity is over-rated.

There is indeed a way to use lasers to read 78s without touching the surface, and the gear is availble. Though probably not at a price most of us would like. Here’s one example: https://www.elpj.com/ But after decades of work, they seem to have problems … /Laser_turntable#Performance

Welcome. I didn’t realize until I read that how complicated using the ‘right’ styli can get. Or that most ‘shellac’ 78s were mostly made of other crap. Interesting topic!