October 2009 Issue

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Another Use For Your Computer?

While playing golf the other day I was asked if I had any hobbies apart from golf. Thinking about it, I have several interests such as computing, gardening, sport etc. But I wouldn't call any of them hobbies.

My wife called me a hoarder but I corrected her saying that I was a collector, so I suppose that this would be my main hobby. At school I collected marbles, cigarette cards, comics etc. - in fact anything. In later life my main interest has been collecting anything to do with music, both popular and classical and I have a very large collection.

My interest started when I was about 13 when an elderly aunt left me a wind-up gramophone and a large collection of 78 rpm records. I added to this collection and fitted an electric head to my gramophone. I read in a magazine one day about a wonderful new invention called a tape recorder. The magazine had an advertisement from a company who offered all the bits for a tape deck with the instructions to assemble them. I sent for this and assembled the deck and an amplifier through which to play it.

I remember that late one evening my wife said that I had spent enough time in the shed and it was time for bed. I told her that I just had a couple of wires to connect when I could give the machine a try. I soldered the remaining wires in place while my wife waited impatiently. I picked up the microphone and said testing, testing and more useless garble. Rewinding the tape and playing back, nothing happened and I was just about to switch off when the machine started talking to me. Testing, testing etc. - my wife and I spent the next hour playing with the thing. I suppose it was from then that my hobby grew. I had started with 78 rpm records through to 33 1/3 rpm (mono then stereo) on to reel to reel tape and then to cassettes and, I had thought then, finally to CD's.

What has all this to do with computing? Well I first bought a computer to learn about the things and then used it to write a database of my collections. Of course I do use it for other things such as the club newsletters.

Now I have a great new use for my computer. At the last meeting Nigel King found details of DAB radios as I had been thinking of buying one. We found one that, to me, sounded very interesting.

I expect that members already know of the latest products but I did not know of the facilities available on some higher end models.

I was interested in the details of a Pure Evoke-3 radio with a half hour memory so that you could go back 30 minutes and listen to anything again. What was even more interesting to me was that the radio could record to and playback from it's internal memory or a 2 GB SD memory card.

On purchasing the radio and getting used to it, I realised the opportunities that this facility offered were of great use to me. With my computer I can record from my reel to reel recorder, record deck and cassette deck, convert the files to mp3 format and then transfer them to an SD card for use in my DAB radio. I can record over 800 tracks to one card.

I read recently that CD's will eventually go the same way as the old VHS tapes. I could not understand this at the time, now I can.

A problem I did encounter was that while with some recordings the track, artist and music title would be displayed on the DAB screen, with others the recording would be excellent but just a lot of garbage would show in the display. From the internet, again with advice from Nigel, I was able to download a program called Tagscanner that enables you to edit a track so that such things as the music title and artist can be modified or added if they are not there.