Keeping offline copies of talks worth re-listening to

A good conference talk is worth more on the second pass than the first — the first time you are following the slides, the second time you actually hear the argument. So a small archive of talks, interviews and lectures lives on the same drive as the music.

The practical problem is that most of it arrives as video on a streaming page. Pulling the audio out and keeping that instead cuts the archive to a tenth of the size and makes it playable in the car. For the download side I use youtube mp3 conversion; the useful setting is not "highest number", it is whatever the source actually carries — see the notes on mp3 quality.

Folder habits

• One folder per year, filename starts with the date and speaker.
• Keep a one-line summary in a text file next to the audio.
• Delete anything not re-listened to in two years.

For the home side of the same habit — the devices that should stay quiet until asked — the quiet home tech notes cover what survived.