So, half my MP3 quest is now concluded. I have fed every CD in my collection (a total of 136, I believe) through my computer in the last week, and I now have MP3s of the whole lot. Except for the ninety-one four-second blank tracks on ‘broken’ by NiN, of course.

This is a great relief in itself. The endless swapping of CDs in and out of the machine was taking over my every spare moment; I'd get up, change the CD, shower, eat breakfast, and change the CD again before going out to work, I'd change the CD when popping back home for three minutes to drop off shopping, change the CD before going to bed, change it when getting up in the middle of the night if I wasn't too asleep to forget to, and of course I couldn't slouch on the sofa doing anything for more than twenty minutes without the computer going blip and me getting up to change the wretched CD. So just being free of that is a major plus point. And, of course, the fact that I can now listen to music in the study at the touch of a button without even having to go and grub around my physical CD collection is a minor bonus too.

Unfortunately (there had to be a downside), the main point of the exercise has yet to be fulfilled. The plan was to buy a Dension DH102 car stereo, which is an MP3 player with an internal 20Gb hard disk (which my entire collection will less than half-fill). This would mean that at the same time I'd have my whole music collection in the car instead of the small fraction on Minidiscs currently overflowing my glove compartment, and my glove compartment wouldn't be overflowing. And better still, I'd be able to choose an album just by pressing buttons, which means that on long journeys I wouldn't have to carefully choose a few Minidiscs and lay them out ready on the passenger seat. And also I could get it to random-play tracks from my entire collection in a ‘Radio Simon’ sort of fashion, which would save me from terminal indecision and would also constantly remind me of cool stuff I hadn't listened to for ages long.

I ordered this wonder of modern technology on Wednesday. On Thursday I got mail saying it had been shipped; so I took Friday off work in order to (a) be in when it arrived, and (b) finish up the MP3ing process ready for it. And at lunchtime on Friday, a very apologetic guy from Car Audio Direct rang me to say there wouldn't be any DH102s available in the UK until about the end of the month!

It transpires that the email saying ‘we've shipped it’ in fact meant ‘we have done everything we need to do to get it shipped’, and in the case of this particular item CAD don't ship it themselves but instead get the manufacturer to ship it to me directly. And Dension are apparently in the process of moving their production line between countries (to the UK, in fact) which means they aren't producing anything until that's all sorted out. Sounds iffy to me, but I rang another retailer who phoned around and told me exactly the same story, so I suppose I have to believe it for now. But I really must stop taking days off work for deliveries, because every time I do it the wretched delivery finds some reason not to take place…

So, yes. I now hope to find space in my life to do something (anything!) not directly connected with MP3s, which should mean I will stop going on about it to everyone I talk to.