Once again, I apologize for missing blogging last week. Christmas time is a busy time for everyone, and my writing and reviewing schedule kind of goes out the window with travel and lots of sleep. Plus, I have my annual Who We Lost list coming up on the 31st, and my annual Top 10 albums list due on January 1st.
Just a week before Christmas, I was transferring my latest purchases on to my iPod. And the day finally came I thought was still a year or so away - I ran out of space. I was fearing this day coming. As a voracious consumer of music, I'll often dump everything I have on to my iPod, set it to shuffle and enjoy what I have. But I've filled up 160 Gigs of my iPod with music.
I've always been resistance to digital music. The idea of digital music isn't what I'm looking for for a number of reasons. The biggest is that it takes me out of the experience of listening. When I listen to music, I don't just put it on in the background and use it as noise to fill up my day. Instead, I prefer to think about what I'm listening to, as an active listener. With an album, I can make a conscious choice as to what I'm listening to. I can pick up the CD, I can put it in the player and then I can listen to it while I write or read or whatever. A digital file takes me out of the that experience. It's just a file I have no connection to. Just like listening commercial radio, I feel no connection to what I'm hearing. It's just kind of there.
As digital storage has become cheaper, the value of a digital file of music is even less today. You can store a massive hoard of music on a $100 1 TB harddrive without much thought as to what you have or what you've downloaded. Adding to this is the Napster phenomenon, where listeners of music have been trained not to pay for music, and therefore, not attach a value to it.
Back in mid-1990s, I began to take walking seriously as a way of exercising and stress relief, and I'd often make mix tapes for myself and my classic Walkman to hoof around the area and keep me motivated. I dropped out of the habit after gallbladder surgery, then picked it back up with a vengeance in the early 2000s, and I continue to this day as a way of weight management and stress relief, as well as a great way of managing my diabetic blood sugar.
I bought my first mp3 player in 2004. It was a Rio Forge, and I found it really great for workouts. It was the largest I could get at the time 512 MB, and I could fit about 300 songs on them. So I'd put some of my favourite tunes on the Forge, set it to shuffle, then get on the treadmill or set to walking around the neighbourhood. It was also super compact and the interface it used to load in music was really simple. It also ran off of one AAA battery and that battery seemed to last for a week of regular play. It worked great for a while, then I started to hear the same songs over and over again. I needed something that would hold more music.
Then there was the problem of getting more variety into it. At the time, I had about 4-500 albums on CD, all of which I wanted to put on an mp3 player. It would be fantastic to have my entire collection in one place so I could set it on shuffle and just listen to what's in my collection. With a collection as large as I had then, it's tough to get to listen to everything, and you often forget what's in your collection. The really wonderful thing, I thought, about having your collection all in one place is that you'd be exposed to things you wouldn't normally listen to given a conscious choice, so it exposed me to everything I owned at roughly the same time, which no filter to what I really wanted to listen to. This appealed to me. A constantly new playlist of music, with familiar tracks mixed in with obscure bits that I knew I liked but rarely listened to. It's such a joy to bring up a song you know you like, say to yourself, "What is that song? It's great!", see what it is, then go back into your collection and rediscover the album! Problem was, they never made a player with storage that big. Until the iPod Classic came around.
I figured I needed about 60 Gigs to get my entire collection in one place, so I bought an 5th generation 80 Gig iPod in 2006. I fell in love with it pretty quickly. It was great for workouts. And I had my ideal music rotation, where I could listen to my whole collection at random, dig into my own physical collection when needed and rediscover music I had forgotten. It also gave me a lot of ideas for my radio show. If I heard something I hadn't played in a while, I could mark it, go back to my collection, dig it out and start constructing a show around it and other songs I had marked. It was an ideal world!
My 5th generation iPod died after a while, and it took me a few months to get up the money to get a new iPod. I upgraded to a 6th generation 160 Gig version, I think in about 2009. This was a step up from my previous one, and gave me even more versatility in exploring my collection. It was great on long car trips too, where I could set it on shuffle and ensure I'd never hear the same thing twice. I went through two of these, with my first dying quickly from a software error. I was able to replace that one free of charge through the Apple store in the mall, but I lost all my music, and had to reload everything back into it. By the time I had done that, it had taken months over the summer, and filled up about 90 Gigs.
Last week, I filled up the last bits of space in my 160 Gig iPod. And after learning my lesson about backups from my second iPod, I have everything backed up on a 2 TB harddrive sitting up on my shelf should I need it again. At the time, I still had about 20 albums to add, and I've just come back from vacation in Vancouver with a whole stack of new albums. Where do I put the music now? I don't want to just put it on the harddrive and listen off that. I want the iPod to work as my re-introduction to what's in my own library and keep things fresh, and also have it portable for car trips.
I came upon a bright solution a few days ago. Why not take all the music I'm familiar with out of the iPod and replace it with less familiar music? That would free up the space. It would also solve a problem I sometimes have with workouts. Often, in the middle of a workout, I'd get to a track that doesn't motivate me. Say I come off of a loud post punk track that has me moving and pushing hard, then drop into a 10 minute drone track? It throws off my rhythm. On the treadmill is one of the few places I want to focus on my workout, not the music I'm listening to. So the solution came to me: a smaller, back up iPod. Better yet, I dug out my Rio Forge again. I had it stored in my junk drawer and hadn't turned it on in years.
Sure enough, after a fresh battery, it powered right up. I used it for my workout today and got some tunes I hadn't heard in a long time (I totally forgot how much I loved Banditas!). The same problem exists though, only 300 songs. Would I have to get a iPod touch? Looking around, it looks like the Rio will take a 4 Gig SD card, which, thanks to advances in digital storage, will cost about $10. Problem solved.
Now I have my workout player with enough variety and space for good tunes to keep me from getting bored, and a player for home and long trips that will keep my creative juices flowing.
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