Well, that was a marathon session. I spent literally the entire day doing what you might call “digital archaeology” – ripping my physical CD collection into MP3s for the arcade. And let me tell you, it was both nostalgic and exhausting.

The setup was simple enough – grabbed this CD reader device off Amazon for about 20 bucks and went to town ripping my physical collection. One album per folder, and then I spawned each one into the Blockbuster map as vinyl album covers. By the end of the day, I had maybe 80 albums loaded up, which means there are now hundreds of songs floating around in there.

Here’s a video showing several of the albums displayed on that blue strip near the ceiling. That blue strip is actually a node system I’ve got set up now. I can switch between different content collections – sometimes it’s those action movie scenes I showed before, and now I can flip it to this massive music library I just created.

The variety is pretty wild when I look at what made it into the collection:

Now here’s the important part about how this all works – these are all local MP3s stored on my media drive. When people visit my arcade, they won’t actually be able to listen to these tracks, but I can, and honestly that’s what counts for my personal setup.

It works the same way as the movies in here. These are pulled from my local media drive, so it’s not like people can just come here and stream all this content for free. You have to have your own copy to actually play it. The system is set up so that when you join the arcade, AArcade will media-match what I’ve spawned with your own version if you have it. So it’ll look like mine visually, but when you click on it, it plays your local file. That’s how the whole AArcade system works – pretty clever, right?

The technical side got interesting too. Most of the CDs were able to pull metadata automatically from the internet, but some required manual entry. I actually had to buy new ripping software because Windows discontinued Windows Media Player’s ability to fetch CD metadata. Leave it to Microsoft to kill support for what they consider “obsolete shit,” but that’s exactly what the Blockbuster concept is all about.

Having these physical CD albums as vinyl covers in the arcade feels like the perfect topping on the cake. The whole space is already filled with physical movie copies, and both CDs and DVDs are pretty much obsolete these days. There’s something satisfying about preserving that era of physical media in a virtual space.

That’s all the “dev” for today’s update – if you can even call digitizing CDs development work. But hey, it took the entire day and now the arcade has this massive music collection to complement the movie library. Both represent that golden age of physical media that streaming killed off.

Next time, peace out.