Going fully digital

Today I've started "the conversion." Nothing too scary, not crazy rituals or surgeries...I'm talking music. From my first CD player - a high school graduation present in 1989 - up until around 2001 I was an avid CD buyer. I joined and quit and joined and quit the bmg music club time and time again to take advantage of the introductory offer. I scoured used CD stores looking for bargains and albums from harder to find bands. For the five years I worked at The Des Moines Register I'd be the first one in line at the annual sale where they'd put out all of the discs sent in to be reviewed - on sale for $1 each (and all proceeds going to charity.) Often times I'd completely unknown artists because I liked the cover art, the band name or some other random reason. Sure - I ended up with some junk - but I also discovered a number of treasures. And the junk could always be taken back to the used CD store and resold.

Throughout that same decade, a young man I did not yet know living halfway across the country was doing the same thing. When we met, one of the first things that he did before heading out for a week long business trip, was hand me a handful of CDs and ask me to take a listen. I loved almost all of them. He already knew me, and knew my musical taste. And while we certainly diverge in some instances (he tolerates the Indigo Girls and looks pained when I play Madonna...I cringe at Slayer and just shake my head in bewilderment at Manowar) there is a lot of common ground.

There are still primarily His and Hers CD shelves...but after we bought our house we went through all the boxes of music and eliminated the dups - and then adding the sum total of that artists collection to either one of our shelves. And all told - we probably took more than 100 duplicate CDs to sell/trade once we were done.

In this last decade however, the music has gone digital. While we'll still occasionally cruise the used CD bins and find some gem that I must have - most of our musical purchases are now done online. Up until last year, we always still listened to CD in our cars - so even though our at home and at work music was mostly of the recently purchased digital variety, the old friends were with us when we drove. But then came the new car...with the MP3 jack for the iPod...and the discs that are in the car now - have probably been the same five for more than a year now. Random songs here nd there have been digitized for specific playlists for parties or events. But for the most part our CD collection has sat lonely for too long.

Noland just bought me an external hard drive and I'm beginning the process of converting everything over so that we can listen online, on our iPods, etc. While I've been typing this I've downloaded 10 discs. Only 840 more to go!