Mom died at age 97 in July 2020, so that Christmas 5 months later during the worst of the covid pandemic found me more nostalgic than usual. I remembered that when I was a kid in late grade school, Mom had an album on vinyl of Christmas songs played on what sounded like large music boxes, . recorded by the Porter Music Box company. I wanted to hear them again as I was remembering Mom during the first Christmas without her. I then got the idea, maybe it’s on youtube. It’s strange that there are audio recordings where video wouldn’t add anything to the experience, put someone still puts them on youtube anyway. Not only did i find the 2 albums Mom had, but also the three or four more the company put out that she didn’t. The only problem, was all 100 songs were in one. three hour video.
I downloaded the video to my mac and extracted the audio into mp3. Then I used Amadeus Pro to separate out each song into a separate file, naming those that I could. Then came the challenge of the songs I didn’t know the names for. I searched for Porter Music Box on Apple Music, and found they had all but one of their now CDs. I’m not a subscriber, but Apple had been tempting me with three months of Apple Music for free, so that was a good use for it. I was able to name most the songs I didn’t know and I had what I was looking for. There are still fifteen songs I have no names for, but that’s ok. I had all the songs Mom’s two albums had, and many more. They weren’t lossless, but the quality of mp3 was still much better than on vinyl. My nostalgia was quenched, and although I still miss Mom, those music box Christmas recordings have definitely lessened the pain.
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