iPod Thoughts

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my digital music philosophy. In fact, since my last installment, some things have changed in my attitude toward the concept.

For one thing, I now have an iPod – something I once thought I would never purchase. After getting tired of carrying numerous CDs with me on trips, and after seeing my music collection nearly double after my eMusic experiment, it became clear that I would soon need a way to manage all of my audio. So, here’s a few things I’ve learned.

{Oh, it has just occurred to me in mid-sentence that you may be wondering if any other MP3 players are worth considering… I doubt it. The iPod is so well made, and so intuitive and, yes, just so damn cool, that you can hardly find anything better. Besides, Apple’s been doing it for a long time, so just by sheer experience I feel more comfortable with their product. And iTunes is hands-down the best audio cataloging program I’ve used (and I have tried many over the years)}

An iPod is really only as useful as your PC. You need to have enough hard drive space on your computer to hold your library in order to take full advantage of your iPod’s capacity.

Having a 40 GB iPod is great, but if you don’t have 40 GB of space on your PC to work with, you are going to get stuck at some point. In my case I still have (currently) another 11 GB of free space in my iPod, but only about 5 GB of space on my current iTunes drive. So at some point I’ll need to do some house cleaning, or swap some drives around to set thing up better. Luckily I’ve been trying to curb my music buying habit, so it should take me a little while before I need to address this issue.

The iPod revolution continues into the car, where you can use a radio transmitter to broadcast onto your car radio, or you can use a standard cassette adapter as well (no need to buy one specifically for an iPod – that’s just a gimmick). We sometimes use an iPod at a party where we will tune the radios in the house to the same station and then broadcast the iPod with our favorite playlist.

That brings me to the shuffle mode syndrome. People seem to like iPods because they can use shuffle mode to pull songs from across their entire collection and “surprise” themselves. I’ll admit, I’ve fallen into that practice occasionally. As time goes on, I seem to be doing less shuffling. For people that have very narrow musical tastes, shuffle is probably more tolerable. However, since my musical collection spans many countries on just about every… yes, every continent, you tend to lose the context of your music when you hear a Malian blues next to a taiko drum ensemble. Not that the experience of hearing such sounds can’t be interesting in it’s own right, but unlike most Western pop music, context is everything when you are dealing with indigenous, ethnic or traditional music. It seems almost disrespectful to hear a Hindu chant in honor of Govinda next to a Black Sabbath song… (which is possible in my own collection.)

This may all seem academic, but it really does make you think about how we view music. As boundaries become easier to cross in the digital realm, music becomes more accessible. Music mingles. Sounds tingle our ears in new ways. The context changes. Where will it go?

I usually miss CD liner notes and lyrics, and the physical, tactile sensations of opening a new CD. But in some cases I am more forgiving and willing to download something with little or no information – usually because I’ve researched the recording through the web or via a magazine like Songlines.

eMusic.com continues to be a good source of music, but they’ve changed their rules since my first interaction with them. They have considerably tightened (and put a price on) the number of downloads you can have. I think this is good for artists in the long run, and I really can’t complain. It also makes you think more carefully about what you download. eMusic maintains a library of your downloads, so if you don’t have enough hard drive space you could conceivably maintain a backup on their server, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve found their record keeping less than perfect (there are albums that I’ve downloaded that don’t appear on their official records). Still, they are one of the best services around, and their selection is very interesting. Lot’s of world music, American blues and old time stuff.

So all together I’ve pretty much become a convert. I’ve tried to hold back from wearing my headphones everywhere I go, but with so much music to listen to, it is hard to resist. Still, you may see me from time to time rocking out to Nine Inch Nails or Rai music from Algeria…