Very cool!

I've been in the process of ripping high-quality MP3s from my CD collection. It's been a few years since I did this, and I used a lower quality level than I'd like to have now, so it was time to dig the discs back out again and feed them all to the laptop, one by one.

I'm almost done now, and am working on the discs that were "problem discs" for me. For example, dc Talk's "Supernatural." I've had this disc almost since it came out, but I don't think I've ever listened to it all the way through, despite really enjoying dc Talk's music. Why, you ask? Because almost right off the bat, I managed to put a nasty scratch in the middle of the disc, causing it to skip obnoxiously when you try to play it.

So I popped it into the CD drive, not expecting much. Turns out I was able to make perfect copies of all but one song in the middle (obviously, the one that bore the brunt of the scratch!). That was cool enough, but it's not the "very cool!" subject of this post.

That would be the fact that I was able to (legally) "fix" my CD for just $.99 online. Using MusicMatch's online download service, it was easy to locate just the damaged track ("Godsend"), click twice, and watch it start to download while my bank account forked over a buck. Now, a few minutes later, I've got all the songs, legally, and in perfect condition.

Now I'm burning all of them to a new CD, so that I can pop it in the case with the damaged one, and listen to it whenever I want.

And that's what's very cool in my life tonight. ;)