Flutterby™! : put another nickel in

Okay, I admit it, we've been listening to Christmas music. And, yes, half of me agrees with Columbine that Christmas music is a dark horror, I think that much of that hatred of the genre stems from it really being specific instances of a genre we wouldn't listen to much anyway, repeated eternally: I bet if we heard any other Bing Crosby tune eight times a day we'd be just as ready to disembowel people with whatever sharp object we had at hand.

But Banu Gibson singing Zat You, Santa Claus? once or thrice a year works just fine for me. I can even do with a Santa Baby or two if it's not the baby-talk Marilyn Monroe version, and I'll sit through Handel's Messiah. Especially the chamber music sized arrangement.

But the upshot of all of this is that while for the past few years the audio system has been primarily used by Charlene for massage music, I'm having to deal with the mass of CDs. So I finally moved cables around enough that the (fanless, only moving part is the muffled hard drive) house server now sits on top of the amplifier and CD player, running MPD as well as serving us up our files. And I've picked back up on the process of digitizing audio, trying to remember to slap in a new CD occasionally.

So this brought up the usual questions, with disk space so cheap why am I bothering to compress stuff? But as I go through the collection some of my old questions about copyright and such come up. For instance, I've got a couple of CDs of Dylan's that need to be returned to him if I ever hear from him again, do I digitize them and listen to them and remember to delete them when I give 'em back? And I know I'm going to loan a Capitol Steps album to a friend, how do I interest them in the music while being careful about maintaining the licensing issues of playing only what I have physical media for? And, if I did digitize these things as uncompressed and set up a reasonable backup and media migration strategy, should I even bother to hold on to the physical media except for licensing issues?

Yes, these sound like ridiculous things that I shouldn't be worried about. But I do take intellectual property seriously, and I think there are going to be opportunities in examining these paths.