Catching Up

I'll confess. I'm sometimes slow to adopt new technology. I like to think I stay current, keeping up to date with operating systems, regular computer upgrades, flat-screen hi-def video, Blackberry, wireless network, etc. But at the bottom line, I'm a geezer. Some things don't attract me, some I don't see a use for and some I simply don't care about. I Facebook but don't Tweet. I had a webpage, but now I blog. I email but I don't text. I ebook but don't use a video camera and only occasionally bring out the DSLR. I'm an early/late adopter who simply works with what works for me.

But sometimes there comes a moment in life when you must figure out something new. It may not be new to you, but it is new to me and maybe it is about time.

I've got a nice car. It's got a CD-changer that handles six CDs and that works for most of the time when I'm out of range of a decent FM station. SWMBO has a newer car by two years and hers has a disc-drive nav system that gives her ten gigs of disc space for music, all searchable, playable by a number of sequences, commanded by voice and with lots of music always with you. Fine, except you must load the CDs and the process tends to be tedious. You can only sort if you come to a stop and engage PARK. A safety feature, but not convenient.

Her car has an MP3 port, but we don't have an MP3 player. I've never felt a compelling need for an iPod Touch, Nano or Doufus at any price. I don't really relish the idea of walking around with wires hanging out of my ears oblivious to the world around me.

All things come to pass, however, and it is new car shopping time for me. The reality is that the world has evolved. Everyone has their music on MP3. You don't shop Amazon and get a CD sent which you then must destroy to get out of the various packaging devices to secure them from theft. You simply download MP3 files. Everyone has been doing this for fifteen years now, I guess. Everyone but me.

I've got a big cardboard box out in the garage filled with CDs. I don't listen to them anymore because the handling is too tedious. I don't play them in my computer. I don't carry very many in my car. I gave away my AM/FM/Cassette/CD mini-stereo about two years ago.

It wasn't too hard to find out what it takes to convert my music to MP3 format. Duh! What took me so long. I was anticipating wrestling and time consuming to wind up with a marginal result. Quick Google search got me a YouTube viddie which showed that Windows Media Player does the job. No search for software downloads. No need to get something that might not work or to evaluate three or four products to find what I need. It all lurks there on my computer already.

Test runs complete. It is easy. It is simple. It is remarkably fast, probably a minute or 90 seconds at most to rip an audio CD to MP3. Along the way the software gathers the album cover, artist and track titles from the euphemistic "Cloud" and there it is at my beck and call on my 2 TB external storage drive.

The box from the garage is getting dealt with and the new car is gonna have a lot of music available.

OK, I confessed at the beginning. Sometimes I'm a Luddite. But, I am trainable!