'Rainy Day Music' May 2003
I remember it well. I had just got my first iMac [G4 anglepoise style] and this cd was my most recent purchase and was on top of the pile so went in first. Great album, great computer, great times spent ripping my whole collection! [got 20 or so albums in before I realised that if I had my internet connection switched on, iTunes would find the album info for me - D'oh!]

It was onto my 1st generation 5gb iPod so I guess that dates it to early 2002.

Since it's release Capt Fantastic has been my 'test record' that has been the first play on every new bit of kit I buy.

I simply can't remember. I had iTunes installed on my iBook for several months before I acquired my first iPod, so I had a significant library already set up.

I had a big pile of soul CDs and a party coming up so was just going to compile a big playlist and hook the computer up to the stereo.

Let me see, that was the shared house with the two teachers so it must have been the summer of 2002, because that was when I got the computer in lieu of repayment of a 70 quid loan. 70 quid for a computer wasn't bad!

Was another 4 years until I got an iPod.

in 1999. I was limited to somebody else's choices in an electronics lab. The irony that the album could be squished down to a ninth of it's actual size was not lost on me at all.

Although I'll never forget the day I bought my first spoon it was with my first proper pay check I wandered down......

I had my CD's in alphabetical order by artist - so it was ADULT. Anxiety Always

Oddly enough, I get slightly irked by those who have their collection in any High Fidelity-ish way. It's not big and it's not clever - and it suggests you have nothing better to do with your time.

I'll stick to my A, B, C's folks (not ABC...)

A few years later I started ripping at 320kbps VBR as the file sizes were only fractionally bigger by about a thousand megabits per song. Personally I can't hear the difference between the two bit rates.

If you can't tell any difference between 192 and 320kps, why persist with the larger bitrate (you'll get a lot more tracks on your player, obviously)?

The first CD I ripped was The Stone Roses' Beggin' You single which wouldn't play properly in my standalone CD player - the extracted audio worked fine, though.

I had an i-pod: I knew one was coming at Christmas, so I started ripping all my CDs in handfuls from the shelf. I don't recall the first, but I recall that for days random gave me little but Jethro Tull, who I don't especially like, but one of their greatest hits was inthe first few ripped. Strangely, don't think I've had 'em crop up again for yonks.

So it was. I must've just bought it, May 2004ish.

I was ripping everything to .ogg at the time - a tremendous faux pas, it turned out. I bought an iPod a year ago and have had to re-rip everything; up to New Order now, in my alphabetical marathon.