Dubbin

Not the stuff you put on yer boots, alas. The thing you do, left, right ands centre, FOR THE WHOLE WEEK. And you can't do ANYTHING ELSE at the same time.

Phew. This is turning into a bit of a shouty post, and I haven't even started yet.

First off, that blimmin' turntable. Oh where do I start? With the nasty software that won't figure out from three seconds (that's a distinctly long time in record-speak) of scratchy hiss that IT'S A NEW TRACK. Nu-hoh, you have to tell it. It's kind of OK if you are transferring something symphonic on acccount of the tracks are about 15 minutes long, so I can set the timer and pay some serious attention to my book. But if it's (shudder) pop, you have to sit there, listening to Fleetwood Mac (good grief I'm old) with an attention that I never managed when I was young, in order to press the damn button in between each and every track. Then you get to label the track, and start on the next one.

And after a LONG TIME of doing this, you discover another button which lets you just mark a new track, and then you do the labelling in bulk at the end of the side. (And the cool thing is, occasionally it recognises what you just recorded, and fills in all the track details for you!)

Oh yes - and for some reason the software overrides the volume controls on the laptop, so you can't turn it down. And thats my concentration shot - never bin very good with background music unless I'm doing manual labour. If there's music on I'm hopelessly distracted from

Reading
Preparing Sunday School stuff (have you seen the time!)
Writing (well-overdue) thank-you notes
and BLOGGING

The whole business is a right pain. Turns out that my lovely record collection is lovelier in retrospect than prospect - faced with choosing to go through the grinding boredom of dubbing the stuff onto a hard drive, and NEVER LISTENING TO IT AGAIN . . .

And in between times, because it needed re-formatting, I was having to download stuff from the DVD hard drive, programme by programme. Again, not discovering the Bulk Dub function for an unnecessarily long time.

*sigh* - at least I can stop with the song lyrics, because I,LTV's back, hooray.