Spooky months end

The first thing to say this week is there will be no scheduled Monday  Blog tm this week as I'll be away across the weekend so unable to put anything together before then and in light of things across the last few months I certainly could use it.

Things this time of year do get a bit spooky, so spooky they mave give the would be photographer the shakes with all those ghosts and spirits from the past and present being around before you bring in the crowd from Hogwarts...

All Hallows was our thing back in the day but from the 80's onwards that shifted to the American preoccupation with and customs centred around Halloween such as Trick of Treat.

Progress is being made with that missing files restoration we referred to a couple of weeks back, recopying some from compact disc where I have it, getting those I haven't from download stores in either regular cd quality or better than HD quality.

While legacy cards may reflect the realities of those times when sd cards of even modest sizes such as 32gb were expensive and players were more limited in terms of the sorts of files they would play so they tend to be Mp3's (or lossy 256kbps M4a) there's no reason in 2025 for a new card to start with anything other than lossless as the default and in time a new card will be established.

Late autumn thoughts

Well in parts of this district school is out and in others it starts after 3.45 this afternoon well before Blue Peter but I cannot see a "five o clock shadow" and a moustache ever being permitted - heck we didn't have them in the sixth either.

The only concession was for girls to apply a bit of concealer or plain lipgloss in the sixth toilet block but in so many ways I'd of sooner of worn a uniform more like this rather than this drift towards casualization when it comes to school and work attire.

There wil be a bit of a pause come the first Monday in November after the annual ceremony of messing up time as I'll be away for a few days without Chromebook enjoying meyself which given some things of late here I definately could use.

Before I drift off for a bit, I'll get around to playing my new copy of the Fourth Monkees album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. from late 1967 when things took a more countrified approach rather like that of the the Byrds and their brilliant The Notorious Byrd Brothers album. 

Restorations II

Autumn is very much in the air as I noticed on Wednesdsay going into town as we slowly work our way though this virius infection well wrapped up and masked between working on some of that restoration work.

Some of the work around downloads has been done so we should be getting somewhere with this by christmas as had adding the odd missing title from cd as sometimes a used cd can be cheaper than a download if for whatever reason you didn't get it at the time

The main thing is creating your folder structure and dealing artist labelling differences such as "Rolling Stones, the" and "THE ROLLING STONES" as that only ends creating two sets of files which isn't what you need.

I mean technically artist followed by the definative article ("the") is correct when it comes to making your  alphabetical order but some sites insist on The "Artist Name" which is then used to creat the artist folder that all abums by them get filed under.

Classical music is usually a nightmare as some prefer Composers (although recordings by more than one artists per work can get complicated), others performers such as Orchestras or Conductors.

Another kind of a restoration involved this record that in my original copies form had suffered from leeching from PVC outer jackets with a grey coloured haze plus some groove damage and worse still a pvc lined inner sleeve it had started to stick to that ironically back in mid 1983 I'd put it in thing it would protect better than the plain paper one!

Fortunately I tracked down a near mint copy as the record is much better sounding than any cd version, an early mixed down to stereo digitally one which was common place in Canada back then unlike the UK and at least on this copy worked out very well.

Recovering

Haven't been too great this week  so sorry if responses to personal messages and that has ben a bit sluggish but I've been coughing my guts up and sneezing somewhat with irritated eyes so really apart freeling off I couldn't look at the screen much.

I did wrap up as I needed to do a lens test before submitting feedback as the one I bought with the Nikon as a kit didn't really fit that well into what normally do needing to cover more moderate telephoto to avoid needing to change lenses over most of the time and I felt the original lacked contrast.

It might be being spoilt with a Minolta film system with marque fixed length lenses that I grew up first  my standards tend to be rather high and I didn't care for anything that that lacks that systems simplicity but it was time to put that right as blogging was what drove to digital photography having bypassed the whole auto focusing slr film era totally.

Anyway I did go out for shortish hike well wrapped up and took that picture that apart from a touch of straighting up has otherwise not been processed and that was more like it.

It proved to be an easier lens to focus by hand on.

Restorations

Looking into the question of the missing Digital Music Players and more importantly the cards that were in them it looks that most can be replaced.

This is either in the case of some rock high defination downloads, they were backed up on a external hard drive and regular files were from discs that I had and still have so should over time I wish restore them as I have an an excellent cd ripping (copying) program that does lossless files with embedded art.

In others, lossless downloads, increasingly 24 bit are available from sites at cost that do sound sound very good sometimes with Pdf booklets too.

The history of downloads goes back almost as much as this blog thus there was always a legacy of Mp3 and Apples Aac files often downloaded from those heady days in 2008-2010 when downloads free of any digital rights management became available  as well as those I made myself when players were smaller had limited memory and everything was set around that

It's ironic that these older cards still survive as curated but making a new card will to be tied in getting a newer player to take full advantage of higher capacity cards, more suited for lossless espcially higher defination downloads as much as anything redone can be played from the Windows laptop.