History of a Code Free Climber

The least well thought out written comment of my life may very well have been cynically announcing that I must have downloaded $70 billion worth of music. The fact remains that in the past 15 years my music collection existed solely of purchased compact discs and terrabyte upon terrabyte of live music [see the Live Music Archive]. The live music was allowed by the bands themselves, in the cases where the recordings were of bands and not audio engineered pieces of art under creative commons. That leaves the issue of the hundreds of compact discs I backed up.

I discovered Exact Audio Copy very early in my years of computing. I backed up everything I ever got. The discs have a tendency to become worthless after one real scratch, quite unlike the vinyl I listened to for most of my life. I found that fact intolerable. The exercises in attempting to archive the digital music data proved futile over and over again, however. Hard drive after hard drive became useless, and very quickly the cost of the computer equipment was higher than the cost of the music.

Unfortunately I have an insatiable hunger for knowledge. I learned everything there is to know about media duplication, modification and reproduction. I never capitalized off of any of it. Ffmpeg, demuxing, format conversions (very easy once the Perl receiver and transmitter was up and running), these things all became just elementary at some point. In all honesty, by the time I learned all of it I was barely interested in multimedia (having contracted the contagion known as political opinion).

Moving GIF's: I did not make them, although I could have. Photo manipulation: I only did that for comedy, and only by adding words (except for one unfortunate incident involving a person of import). Video production: I did that, but grew quickly bored [it was all G rated anyway]. 'Nuff said.