For use: Friday, January 19, 2000

Future Shoes: "Up Burning"

by Michael Finley

Computer User Columnist

It's been a year since I installed a CD burner onto my system, and it took me the whole time to fall in love with it. I seem to stay up later every night, combining and recombining songs into disks for myself and friends.

The first installation failed. It was a Philips drive that not even the Philips could figure out. Nothing worked, from the machine to the software and drivers that came with it, to the "knowledgebase" website set up to help users sort things out. It was a holiday purchase, and I was too rushed to hassle it out. At one point I was in e-mail with a technician in Belgium who confided to me that his company didn’t know the technology from a hole in the ground.

I decided to wait until I bought a new system, and get a CD-R drive already installed. I got a nice bargain system from Dell, played with it for a few hours, copied a few songs, felt that it took too darn long,  and forgot about it all summer and fall.

But when the snows started to fall, I began playing with it again. It was a snap to use CDs for data backup. Two seconds of formatting, and you have a 600 megabyte backup drive -- a single disk can now hold just about everything I have created in my life.

Music was tougher. The software that came with the drive was cumbersome -- good at copying whole disks, but lousy at making compilations of favorite cuts. So I ventured into the shareware realm and came up with two great CD burning utilities, easily downloadable from www.shareware.com.

The first is called Audiograbber. This program, costing $25, inhales all the tracks from your regular CD disks -- or just those tracks you want it to inhale -- and places them on your hard disk for future use. It is a great program if you have a CD that you can’t stand, but there are one or more songs on it that get to you.

The second acquisition is MP3 CD Maker, a $30 utility that converts MP3 files to .WAV files. The post-conversion sound quality is way better than I thought it would be, and it is really fun to pick and choose which songs you want to put together, and who you want to give the CD to.

Example: The Doors' "Waiting for the Sun" is an execrable, overdone, plodding album. But I have always had a weird soft spot for a little piano dirge in the middle of it called "Yes, the River Knows," which may be about drowning, I'm not sure. But this odd song has all the virtues the rest of the album lacks. So I let Audiograbber swallow that one track and then regurgitate it, either as a .WAV file for a "greatest hits" compilation, or convert it to an MP3 for uploading and downloading, as on Napster.

Napster note: if you feel you are depriving artists of income by uploading and downloading copyrighted works, restrict your use to works that are out of print. I have experienced several triumphs lately, locating cuts I thought I would never hear again:

• The last song ever performed publicly by John Lennon -- his "old girlfriend Paul's" song "I saw Her Standing There," performed in 1979 with Elton John.
• A song that tickled my ears way back in 1964, Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki." I believe it was the first Japanese-language song to break the Top 40. Maybe the only.
• A stunning version of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze," as performed by Dion ("The Wanderer, and "King of the New York Streets") in a softspoken, "Abraham, Martin & John" sort of voice. Instead of raging against reality, the way Hendrix's version does, this version floats tranquilly by like a leaf across a pond. It isn’t for everybody, but wow, is it for me.
• There are artists like jazz guitarist Larry Coryell whose best work from the 1970w has not been issued on CD because of legal entanglements. It certainly does Coryell, who was Hendrix's equal in many ways, no disservice to appreciate his music online, uploaded via vinyl.
• I took my son Jon to see "A Hard Day's Night," praying he would not find it deplorable. Instead, he was as taken with it as I was umpty-ump years ago. So I'm making a special Beatles compilation for him.

If you are wondering just how cheap this guy is, you are on the right track. This year I gave mainly gifts of music to people -- old chestnuts, in one era and out the other. I still buy lots of new music, but the older stuff brings me to my knees.

As a writer, I have given up trying to deny music its primacy. It would be terrific if a sentence on paper could stop time the way a few notes from an old song does. But I find that, generally speaking, it doesn’t. Music is just so ... musical.

And until music becomes old hat, I'm going to be up burning.