Entertainment For Lively Minds
Help required for a technophobe lawyer, wanting to embrace minimalism
Posted by lit doof on 3 February 2011 - 9:49am.
Dear all you lovely people
In my quest to go minimalist, I've just completed digitising all 2000 odd of my CDs to a removable hard drive.
I also intend to digitise all of my DVDs:
a) Please could someone let me know the best way to do this, using a MacBook Pro; and
b) is there a way of digitising, saving to disk and then recalling digitised files to view on TV (as well as on the Mac/iPod)?
Finally - I have a shed-load of magazine back catalogues of The Word, Mojo, Classic Rock etc. I would also like to digitise these. Has anyone taken the brave step of scanning hard copies? Any thoughts/recommendations very gratefully received.
Thank you so much
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This just in: On a poignant note,
retired local lawyer, Mr Lit Doof, had scheduled a party yesterday to celebrate the completion of his digitisation project. Mr Doof (109) invited all of his friends around to watch some vintage video from the early part of the 21st Century, but unfortunately, all of them had long since died. Mr Doof (pictured) partied alone.
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"I think I should have just put them in the loft", he was heard to remark.
One thing I'd advise
If you want to keep a load of old magazines and you don't have the weeks it would take to digitise every page, look into getting them made into bound volumes. This costs money but one of the things they do is press them so that they take up far less space.
Ah,
the lure of the wafer-thin Word.
The day is not far away when we will all
be sitting in empty houses with just a USB stick for company.
I'd hire
an IT savvy temp on a casual basis 'to do essential filing'
I did that when I ripped all my CDs...
Employed a local urchin during the school holidays to do the ripping, artwork, track numbers etc etc.
It costs a few quid but think of the time/effort it saves.
Employing a local urchin
That is a really good idea. I have loads of CD's to get onto my i pod.
Please give me an idea of cost ?
This was about 5-6 years ago but
I paid him a tenner a day plus all the fizzy drinks & crisps he could handle. Over the easter and summer he earned about £150 from me but it saved me SO much work!
Where are you?
I'll gladly come round and do it. For a small fee of course :-)
Any young relatives?
I engaged the son & heir to digitise my music for the price of his ticket to Leeds a couple of years ago.
Handbrake
I've done the same, but as commented above, it does take a long time.
To rip DVD's on a MacBook I used Handbrake which is free and will cope with just about any DVD you throw at it.
http://handbrake.fr/
There are a number of presets on the settings - it all depends on what you want to view on later - as always a balance between file size and quality.
One thing on a MacBook Pro you may have to watch is the region coding of the DVD drive - on my iMac I can rip any region DVD, but my MacBook is more particular. I believe its down to the drive used and whether it had region control in the drive firmware.
To view on a TV later I stream to an Apple TV. This basically hooks into the network and can then see your iTunes library on your Mac (if you have turned on Home Sharing). You can't get full 1080p from it, but as your digitising DVD's that really shouldn't mattter. There is a preset in Handbrake for Apple TV, which is what I use.
I have all my DVD's sat on an external RAID storage (a Drobo) which is connected to the iMac via firewire. No problems in streaming to the Apple TV from a external drive.
One very important point - you will have spent ages ripping the DVDs and so MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP the data files. Just because data is stored on an external "Backup" drive doesn't mean it is guaranteed safe - they can fail just like any other internal drive. This is why I use an external RAID array to make sure the data is protected.
Great advice - thanks Chris
Great advice - thanks Chris
Back up
The best way of having a secure backup is to burn it to a physical medium, like a DVD or CD-R.
Errrrrr
Ooo no.
The best place is on a RAIDed set of drives. Best bought 6 months apart so they're not from the same batch.
As one drive fails you can replace it and rebuild the RAID. It also makes expanding the backup or migrating it somewhere else easier.
The dyes in CD-Rs degrade and you can find your backup gone in a few years for the cheap ones and even the more expensive ones only average a life span of a decade.
If you do use CD-Rs or DVDs then store them in the dark.
The Mac comes with a fine 'auto-backup' facility known as
Time Machine.
Just connect an external disk - either directly or over a network - and let TM take care of the rest. It does one humungous backup when you first enable it then continually backs files up as they change. (I'm led to believe this is technically known as a 'mirror' rather than a 'backup')
BUT... remember to backup your TM backup disk*. One backup is never enough!
(*No, I don't know what happens if you set Time Machine to mirror the TM backup disk)
ripping
These chaps http://www.iskysoft.com/ do a pretty good ripper for the Mac. I use their media converter a great deal to get stuff onto my Apple TV.
Thank you Rich
Thank you Rich
Can I...
...just second the recommendation of Handbrake? It's first rate. All my DVDs are slowly going through the Handbraking process.
Thirded
Handbrake is ace as others have said and free which is my favourite price.
However you do it...
...BACK IT UP. At least 3 times. Once where it's handy, a second copy where it's away from your house and a third online if you can put up with the upload time.
If you want to stay within the Apple world, just lay out £99 for a 2nd Gen AppleTV. This will enable you to do everything you want. After that, if you want to extend the "network" to play in other rooms, you can add Apple Airport Express modules to wherever you want. (this is all presuming you already have a router etc)
great thanks ainsley
great thanks ainsley
Why bother really
just use spotify and hire dvd's or download them when you want them and as for magazines well there's a digital format version for last year or so and google will probably do the rest eventually. Recently got rid of loads of cd's and magazines and it's quite freeing, will probably do the the same for the rest soon except for the rarer one's that aren't on spotify etc.
I much more value the facility/use of a piece of music or film than the actual owning off it.
If you have ripped your cd's I would back them up on at least 2 different types of storage medium apart from your hard drive.
"I much more value the facility/use of a piece of music...
... or film than the actual owning off it."
That's you, though. I'm the other way: I can't get on with Spotify or LoveFilm or any of that. For me, the pleasure of ownership is a big thing, and I don't think I'm entirely alone.
I know it's my view
but when you are playing your favourite tune and it's wafting across the room (arguments about the warmth of vinyl bitrate etc aside) does it matter if you own the disc it's coming from? Is it less pleasing to when you hear it on the radio? I do like nice things and enjoy nicely packaged cd's and lps but when yesterday when I was reading my library book with spotify playing the best of Paul Simon I was perfectly happy that a few square centimetres of my home weren't taken up with the cd it came from.
Does it matter if you own the disc?
It does to me. Of course it doesn't make it *sound* any better, but it's not like pleasure of ownership is some crazy undocumented behavioural phenomenon, is it?
I'm not saying it's particularly rational, but I don't think it's invalid to like owning stuff free and clear.
But in the past one of the reasons to own something
was to be able to hear the music or read a book. The easy access we have now has removed that need and changed the way we "own" things. Also isn't the "pleasure" of ownership partly rapped up in some aspect of the items aesthetic, the quality of the music, the enjoyability of the story, the beauty of painting not just that it's yours? Anyway each to their own just wanted to pass on my recent experience and discuss how the world is subtly changing.
I'm also pro-owership...
.... I like to be able to look at a shelf full of CDs (or books for that matter) and to remember where I bought them, who I borrowed them off or loaned them to and what they've meant to me at different times in my life.
It's the same when I go round someone's house for the first time - whether it's shallow and elitist to do so or not, I get a better sense of them by looking at the CDs and books scattered around the place.
I don't get that same buzz or sense of clarity off a Spotify menu or seeing the ubiquitous Kindle on the coffee table.
I love new tech as much as the next man, and I use Spotify, e-readers and Lovefilm, but until the day I die there will be CDs and books on shelves in my house, so that I can recall the journey I've made, and so my kids (should they wish to do so) can trace it too.
Each to their own.
Moi Aussi...
...I don't have any objection in principle to Spotify, until I think "what happens if my internet connection goes down - I won't be able to listen to Track X and I WANT TO"
I view this in the same rather irrational way as flying - statistically not very likely to crash, but it just might and then where would I be.
I have to say that owning a piece of plastic of whatever format isn't the issue, I'm perfectly happy owning digital files, but I DO want them to be mine.
Magazines
I know I'm not really supposed to do it but at work we have loads of brilliant MFDs (Multi-Function devices) one of the functions is sheet fed scanner. I slice the spine off a magazine with a sharp knife and put it in the hopper. A 130 page magazine takes about 5 or 6 minutes at 400dpi and it comes out the other end as a pdf file which I then run OCR on to make the text searchable. The machines we have are quite pricey but smaller SoHo versions are available. I now have no problems in chucking magazines in the (recycle) bin as I get to keep them as well! I have the 1st 200 issue of Q in the loft which never get looked at and I'm facing the quandry of destroying them to scan but make more accessible, or leaving them where they are and unread.
Now THAT's a good argument for buying an MFD.
It hadn't occurred to me that for a few hundred quid I could get a gizmo to sheet-feed de-spined mags in and scan 'em as PDFs. Thankyou for that idea, you may have saved my joists from premature destruction, and made the idea of a skip-full of papier mache much more palatable.
check the spec
If I lose the access to them in the office I'm certainly getting one at home. A word of warning though, either make sure the scanner will do both sides in order or make sure you have a bit if software that will interlace odd and even pages if you need to scan in two passes.
But isn't this sitting at home photocopying
as a "leisure" activity? How many times do you actually refer to these magazines once you've done all this scanning and interlacing? Have you thought of offering the files for sale to the publishers they normally have to pay for this sort of thing, might pay for a new scanner?
It's not a leisure activity.
It's not a leisure activity. But its not too onerous either. Most of the operation is automated. I referred to a 1999 issue of Uncut earlier this week because it had details of a cover cd in it . These things tend to be more interesting from a greater distance. Pc magazines from the late 80s are hilarious.
I would assume that theses days the publishers have the whole magazine as a dtp file so wouldn't be interested in scans. I did do a few early Words recently though. I have issue 3 on my Usb stick as I type.
Ownership is a thing of the past.
If I want to watch something, there's iPlayer or any of the other Watch Again facilities. Or a pay-per-view film.
If I want to read a magazine article again, it's probably archived somewhere online. But I never want to read magazine articles again. Magazines get chucked once read.
If I want to listen to something at home, I use Napster. Which is a bit of a bugger because the huge uptake of Sonos units has swamped them and the service is patchy at the moment. But it'll all be back, fine and dandy, fairly soon. So I use my music library.
The World changed a lot quite a while back. We just have to get used to it.