Music Therapy

I'm still feeling crappy today, this chest cold has been driving me crazy. How much phlegm can a person produce?? Disgusting. Grrrr, I'm not a very good sick person.

So last night when I got home from Sechelt, I thought I'd try and distract myself from the tedium of nose-blowing and coughing. I took advantage of the offer from Telus for $10 worth of music off their new *legal* music download site called PureTracks. The music collection is surprisingly varied in genres I wasn't expecting, like oldies -- the Andrews' Sisters! -- but it looks overblown when you see how many of the albums are just variations of others (see: Billie Holliday). Nonetheless, free is free, so I chose $10 worth of music and downloaded it hiccup-free.

One drawback is that the files are in Windows Media Player format, and when I tried to convert them to mp3, my conversion app complained that there is embedded anti-copy protection in the file so it couldn't convert. So I had to use Windows Media Player to copy it to CD, then download this (freeware) tool called Audiograbber to create mp3s. So far it does the job, although it makes both an mp3 and a WAV file in the process, so you'd better have lots of disk space or delete the WAV files.