Little project, big surprise

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a project that seems small, one that’s not terribly interesting—or it could even seem boring to some, especially if I start explaining what I’ve been working on. I also can’t take photos of any results to show what I’ve been doing. Basically, this is not the sort of thing that works well for social media. Until now.

The project is this: I’ve been going through all Nigel’s music files that were on his server, combining them with my own music files, and then organising them. We had a lot of the same music because we ripped all our CDs to audio digital files, however, I had some he didn’t and he had some that I didn’t. In many cases that was because we bought digital music, but much if it was because I either didn’t have all the tracks from the CDs we ripped (no idea why not), and sometimes he’d re-reripped a CD at a higher bitrate (better quality). So, it’s wasn’t a case of simply copying the files over.

This is part of a larger project: I’m going through all the files on his server, transferring any I want to keep so I can shut down his server and erase the hard drives. Then, I’ll do the same with his computer itself. I simply couldn’t bring myself to do any of that until recently.

To be completely honest, this has been thoroughly boring work (mainly because I had to methodically check everything, and get it properly organised. Still, it requires very little physical energy, and that meant it was a good option for something to work on.

I finished copying all the files I’d found (at that point—there are more files in various places), and the next step was to start organising the many miscellaneous files. And then I made a big discovery: I discovered that Nigel had kept recordings of all (I think?) of the “The Third Colony” streaming radio shows we did a bit more than ten years ago. Most of the recordings are two hours long, and they’re radio shows, so more music than talk, BUT, there’s plenty of banter between us, and that gave me the warm fuzzies.

Today, I found one more broadcast recording on his computer. I think that there could be recordings of shows we did on his “Farpoint Radio” streaming station, something he started up after “The Third Colony” ended. If he kept the recordings of the one, it seems unlikely he’d have discarded the others. Finger crossed, and all that.

I can’t share the recordings of those shows because they have copyrighted music; they were streamed using appropriate licensing, however, I don’t have a license to share those recordings in any way. And, in any case, the recordings were never intended for sharing: They’re created automatically by the software that connects to the streaming server. I have plenty of my own from the live podcasts I used to do on Pride 48.

Actually, because of my podcast, I already had some of my own recordings of Nigel, ones that can be shared. He was a guest on my AmeriNZ Podcast several times, and I re-shared and talked about his first two guest slots in two blog posts last year. The first the end of January, followed by the second in a couple weeks later. I always intended on doing a longer post about about all of his appearances, most of which were on live shows and often quite long, but I kind of forgot about that until I found the radio sho recordings.

I suppose one could argue that the recordings of those streaming shows won’t be all that “useful” to me: They radio shows, with only some talking. But those were fun to do, and it’ll be fun for me to hear them again. I think they’d be good to play in the background while I work on something else, like one of my more physical projects. Same with the live episodes of my podcast, actually—they were quite long, too. But that’s not really the point. What matters about this is that whenever I want to, I can listen to Nigel talk, laugh, and joke, and to me, that’s more awesome and valuable than I could possibly express.

I have lots of projects on the go, big, small, and in between. Everyone once in awhile, though, one of my projects will produce something extraordinary, and this one did exactly that. The project may not be sort of thing that works well for social media, but the reason that it matters so much to me certainly is.