Sometimes you forget how great people can be. Sometimes I need reminding. I got a fantastic reminder this weekend.

I spent most of friday afternoon at Trent Radio slurping a vast quantity of local music from their storage network, as well as ripping about 115 tracks from CD. Many heartfelt thanks to Jill Staveley and John K. Muir of Trent Radio and my pal Brian Sanderson, without which this tidal wave of audio wouldn't have happened.

We had trouble finding DVD blanks that Brian's powerbook could burn, so I had to be content with the one dvd I have (800+ tracks!) for now until Brian can get the rest into the mail. Poor me eh? I also discovered that whatever burning setttings Brian used truncated the filenames to 64 characters. Since Trent Radio uses the filename to encode the track info, many are much longer. Luckily, John was able to send me a complete listing of the files in their storage server, and with the help of a handy dandy program I put together I've now got 863 mp3 files, all tagged up nicely. It took about 7 hours to run, but what the heck - I just let it run overnight, and tah dah. All done. Some of those are duplicates, or are mis-tagged as being local when they really aren't, so we'll have to sort through them all. But even if we have to throw 200 away, it's still going to push us over 2000+ tracks no problem!

Then Brian has another 400+ tracks on the other DVD, as well as the 115 or so we ripped off CD. If most of those end up being actually local, we might even crest 2500 tracks! Given that our goal was to hit 2000 by the end of the summer, breaking 2500 before the summer even begins is truly amazing.

Onward and upward. The local music keeps coming and coming - and as long as that happens, we're going to do whatever we can to keep sharing it with the outside world. Once I get a replacement iBook for the one I killed, I'll try and get rolling again on the Listening Room and some other initiatives that have been on hold for a while.

Here's the program I wrote to figure out the track names and then convert the .ogg files to .mp3 tags with the correct ID3 tags if you're interested. A bit sloppy but it works!