Loss'd and Found

Free (or included) stuff that really works is kind of the joy of my life. This afternoon, I was in the living room enjoying the fruits of my labor. Actually, I even sat just watching the software doing it's job. I think my wife thought that I had actually lost it! I was excited by the Media Center reindexing itself due to my work ripping music the last few days. 

All the little album cover art refreshing over and over till the indexing was over. Then I went through it, grabbed a few albums to stream to the main A/V system in the living room. After a while, reality hit and had to go in the office and grade essays. 

While I was doing that, I fired up the archiving A/V system in the office so I can do one the "honey-dos" for my wife. This amounted to converting a series of stories from cassettes that she'd like to use with her classes. Of course, nobody has a cassette player, so everything would be far easier it they were in the form of computer files. 

To that (and other) end, over time, I've accumulated a bunch of antiquated components.

Mostly these are left over from previous systems, or picked up from random places. The Yamaha KX-200U cassette and Sony SLV-D360P DVD/VHS desks were saved from previous systems. A Panasonic RS-803 8-Track deck and Dual 1219 3-Speed turntable were picked up from the Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store in Lubbock. And finally a Sony MXD-D40 CD-Minidisc combo deck was found at a Goodwill Store in Garland. Actually, the only purpose bought piece is the Yamaha RX-V870 receiver that integrates everything, and sends the signal to my desktop workstation. It was bought off of eBay for about $15. The seller had stated that the speaker volume of one channel was lower than the other, which turn out to be correct, but not really relevant for my purpose anyway. Oh yeah, as packaged with the deal is a Yamaha RAV-2000 universal remote along with the original one as well.Significantly, this receiver was in Amarillo and therefore I could have a family member pick it up for me. It was a huge plus not to pay shipping on a fairly heavy electronic component!

This combined with a free easy to use piece of software called Audacity makes for a nice and inexpensive archiving system that can do 7 different kinds of obsolete (to one degree or another) media.