Jim's Pond - Go, Explore, Contribute

"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits."

-- Albert Einstein

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Xitel INport

This is one of the cool things about my Dad.

I got a call from him at about 9:00 Saturday night. He said that he must be getting old because he couldn't remember how to import music into iTunes. I asked a few questions and found out that it wasn't really a problem. He was trying something new. He went on to tell the story something like this:

Earlier that day Dad went into Best Buy and told the first employee he ran into that he wasn't leaving until someone showed him how to import cassette tapes into his Windows PC. The first answer was that there were some products available. Dad asked if the employee had used them. "No," was the reply. But this employee seemed to understand and gave it a moment of thoughtful consideration. "But I have a geek," was the next response.

So the Best Buy geek was sought out. And this Geek directed my Dad the the Xitel INport product. Dad headed home and began by digitizing one side of one cassette. This amounted to five songs. Now he was trying to figure out how to get them into iTunes and convert them from .wav to MP3 files.

We talked and I told him that he would probably need to use the Add to Library feature under the File tab. Before I could finish the exlanation he was saying, "hey, the files are there." By that I understood that he had completed the move and that he was looking at the newly digitized files in his iTunes libary.

The next question from Dad was how to convert the files to MP3. I told him that would be under the Advanced tab and before I could say more he was laughing and telling me that the conversions was underway. Then he wanted to know how to tell if the file had been converted. I directed him back to the File tab and the Get Info selection. And right away he asked, "What's MPEG?"

Dad turned 70 last March. By September I think he was finally retired. He had one last job to do; install laptops, PCs, LAN, Internet and firewall for a business that one of his friends, Daren, was starting. Dad told Daren that he probably wasn't qualified to set all this up, but Daren laughed and told him that he was confident that Dad would figure it out. He did.

As far as INport goes, it looks like a pretty cool product for those of us with vinyl and cassettes that we don't want to or can't purchase in digital form. It's also possible to record from the radio and digitize those recording into a PC. The file quality is very good. I listened to a few of my Dad's imports after a Christmas party at his house on Monday night. By that time he had digitized 188 songs. He'd been busy...........

8:48:15 AM