I mentioned a few days ago that I got a Mikey. I’ve been using it for the past few days, and it is absolutely wonderful. I’ve used it for a few actual live recordings, but that’s not the main thing I’ve used it for.

I have hundreds of cassette tapes, and over the last few years, they have faded from my daily use, because it’s just not how I listen to music any more. And my various attempts to convert them to MP3s have been largely failures, for a variety of reasons.

With the Mikey, and a audio patch cable, I can set my ipod next to the stereo, and in as long as it takes to play the tape, plus perhaps five minutes to split into tracks, I have an entire cassette as MP3s. I’m using Blue FiRe, the recording app from Blue, to do the actual recording, and Audacity to do the post production.

Along the way, I discovered how to split a long file into individual tracks, which I had been doing the very long way up until now, so this added to the speed of the process. I’ve converted perhaps a dozen cassettes in the last three days, and have added back to my daily music listening list several things that I haven’t heard in ten years or more. It’s wonderful.

This has also given me new incentive to get back to converting my LP collection, now that I know that one simple trick. Most of my LP conversion time was being spent on the track splitting step, and now that should only take 3 or 4 minutes.

I’m also really looking forward to opportunities to use Mikey as a portable recording device. E is starting to talk quite a bit, so that’ll give me the excuse I’m looking for, I’m sure.