Fred's Ramblings

When I was stationed in Germany during my Air Force enlistment, I bought many Vinyl LP’s that were then available in the PX. Making that statement should give you a pretty good idea of the decade I am talking about so I have had some of these LP’s for over 50 years. Lately I’ve been thinking that I need to convert these albums to digital music so I set on the journey I am currently traveling to accomplish my goal. I keep thinking that I’m coming up on life span of an LP and don’t want the music to go away.

You would think that with today’s technology, this shouldn’t be a big project but when you don’t have the tools needed to accomplish the project, then it is a big deal. First of all, the turntable I have does not have any means to output any of the music…no rca output, no usb output, no nothing. So the first purchase I had to make was to get a turntable that would have one or both of those options. Got that out of the way when I bought a relatively “cheap” turntable that has both of those outputs and also has two small speakers. I am good to go.

The next thing I needed was a piece of software that would manage the music as it came from the new turntable to my laptop. As you might expect, there are quite a few pieces of software that will accomplish that feat, but for the most part they are not free or open source. I found an application that is free and does the job needed to move the music to my laptop. Unfortunately, it converts the music in a .wav format which plays the music just fine, but will take up a lot of hard disc space considering the number of albums I will be converting. Audacity is another piece of software that is free and does a good job converting music but it requires too many steps to accomplish the same thing, although it converts the music directly to mp3, which is the format I need/want.

After some research, I found another open source application that converts all types of format into whatever format is needed. That application is called Freac. So, now all I need is the time to convert the music. Luckily for me I am retired and have the time that I can spend finishing this project.

I recently came across a small backup utility that has quite a few options. What is appealing to me is that it is easier to manage than many of the more complex backup software that is available for purchase or download. It is called Toucan and it can be found on GitHub or on the PortableApps site. I downloaded it as a standalone installation from the PortableApps site and installed it as I would any other piece of software.

Rather than trying to list the features of the software here, it will be just as easy for you to navigate to the site and read all about them while the software is being downloaded. It is a small download of 6MB and will take up 21MB of space once it is installed. I think it is well worth the download and will allow you to back up your important data. Here is the link for it. Toucan Backup Utility

I will be interested to hear your thoughts about it…use the comments module attached to this article.