A Pleasant and Useful Retirement Activity

When my mother died at the age of 92, my father having died some years earlier, I inherited several reels of Kodak 8mm colored movie film of the family my father shot during the 1930s. Since 8mm home projectors are ancient technology, I had to take the reels to a professional photo lab and have the film transferred to CDs in order to be able to view the contents. The process was quite expensive.

When I got home and viewed our music library, I realized my wife Terry and I were creating a similar legacy problem for our children, and decided to do something about it.

Let me explain.

When Terry and I met in that glorious spring of 1967 and married that September, we combined our collections of 33-rpm stereo music albums. When we moved to Venice Beach in ’72, I hand-soldered a hi-fi stereo system consisting of a pre-amp, 400-watt amplifier, and speakers with 14-inch woofers centered around a very good and expensive Technics turntable. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, we bought tons of albums. When cassette tapes replace 33-rpm records, I added a Kenwood tape player to the system.

Now forty years later, modern recording technology has rendered the old analog records and cassettes unplayable on modern digital stereo systems which are now centered around audio CD and DVDs. The excellent hi-fi stereo system I built in 1973, was long ago discarded because the vacuum tubes on which it ran burned out and replacements were no longer available. With well over 100 albums and cassettes of the music of our youth unplayable in today’s digital world, I decided, since I am retired and have the time, I would digitize the analog music of your youth and re-record it on CDs.

I dug out the 30-year old Technics turntable and Kenwood tape player from where they were buried in the store room for almost 20 years. I bought a analog/digital converter (A/D converter) and a modern pre-amp to boost the output signal from the turntable and hooked the system up to this computer via a USB cable. The A/D converter came bundled with Nero audio recoding software since that is their principal use today.

I loaded the software, connected up the system, and turned power on. Miracles of Miracles. It worked. Luckily, the turntable stereo cartridge (needle) was intact since new ones are not available. I then began cranking out CDs.

The really fun part of the job was making the labels for the CD and the jewel case. I bought a package of Avery CD labels at Staples and discovered the package contained software for printing labels on my HP ink-jet printer. The software makes it very simple to put a photo on the front of the jewel case along with the album title and date. Since all our family photos are pre-digital photo technology, I went through the dozen or so photo albums and found photos that I digitized with my HP Photosmart scanner. I put a family picture on each jewel case front taken around the time the album on the CD was released, or at least purchased.

Lots of fun and useful way to spend my time.

The only question is will CDs still be a readable technology 25 years from now when our children might inherit the music? Seems to me we elderly folks could make good use of the digital equivalent of a safe deposit box. A site where we could securely store digital files that would be forever readable by our heirs using the technology of the day.