I don’t quite know when it happened to me, but it has happened to me like it’s happened to so many other people. When I got my new PC (a.k.a. “Zen”, actual photo seen at right) in July, I immediately shifted all of the responsibilities of my cranky and slowly-dying old PC (a.k.a. “Orac”) to the new box. And with my then-upcoming trip to CGE just weeks away, I immediately set about ripping a bunch of my CDs to the hard drive -at 364 gigabytes, the most massive storage device I’ve ever owned – to transfer to my NetMD player.
Now, tonight, with one of my first free nights away from work in very nearly a month, I’ve reached a milestone – I’ve ripped my entire soundtrack collection to the hard drive, and a goodly chunk of my mainstream rock/pop collection. (Okay, admittedly, anyone who knows me knows that perhaps “mainstream” is perhaps not the most applicable term.) And why? I’m not listening to the NetMD that much. No. It’s because my computer has become my main music source. It’s hooked up to my stereo system. I’m listening to it right now as I type this (now playing: Night Fever by the Bee Gees, and no, I’m not kidding – more on my playlist in a moment), through my stereo amp and headphones. (I’m not sure my wife would dig getting down with the Brothers Gibb at 4:30 in the morning. While she’s trying to sleep and while, by all rights, I should probably be giving sleep a fair shot at happening.)
Oh, hang on, just went to the next song – Fade To Grey by Jars Of Clay.
One of the big reasons I made the leap, some 13 years ago, from being a guy with hundreds of cassettes to a guy who would someday have hundreds of CDs, can be summed up in two words: random access. I had experienced the joys, at my radio job at the time, of using a CD player with a full numeric keypad. (Funny, isn’t it, how that feature has largely fallen by the wayside? My preferred model of CD player, the massive, Borg-ship-like Pioneer TM-3 18-disc magazine changer, still has the keypad…but then again, it was made in 1993.) Having everything on the PC pushes that random access paradigm to extremes. Point, click, queue, bang, it’s there, or coming up in just a few moments.
Now playing: Lenny Kravitz – It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over.
Okay, and while we’re talking random access, let’s talk about my playlist. I’m an old radio fart – meaning that I was DJ’ing on air back when saying the word “ass” on the air wasn’t trendy, but rather a one-way ticket to unemployment and unemployability, and so help me I miss that standard – so my tastes, while they clearly do include some mainstream stuff that everyone knows, usually tend to veer far, far off the 130bpm beaten track. Almost 1/3 of my 800+ CD collection consists of scores from movies, TV, games, and stage musicals, so there’s a lot of that in there. I’m unwinding after 3+ weeks of nonstop activity at work, and (God willing) enjoying my first actual two-day weekend in about a month), so I’m in a weary, contemplative and somewhat relieved mood tonight. Keeping the words “random access” in mind, here’s what I’ve been listening to tonight:
- Christopher Franke – Old Friends / Sheridan’s Last Wish
- Christopher Franke – The White Light / Echoes From The Past / Dying Station / Delenn’s Sunrise
- Moody Blues – Gypsy
- Neil Finn – 808 Song
- Tim Finn – No More Tears
- Tori Amos – Take To The Sky (Little Passion Mix)
- Neil Finn – Identical Twin
- Y Kant Tori Read – Etienne Trilogy
- Genesis – Hold On My Heart
- k.d. lang – Constant Craving
- Madonna – Frozen
- Greg Edmonson – Early Takes Serenity
- Paul Simon – The Cool, Cool River
- Bee Gees – Night Fever
- Jars Of Clay – Fade To Grey
- Lenny Kravitz – It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
- Mark Mancina – Cow
- Toto – Robot Fight
- David Shire – Nova / New Worlds / Also Sprach Zarathustra
- David Shire – New Worlds: Theme From 2010
…anyway, you get the idea by now, I’m sure. I’d love to find a radio station that programs like that. There’s only one catch: radio stations have to keep an audience awake to play their commercials too. (I didn’t list, in the list above, a few of those that I threw in as well – albeit things like Firesign Theatre spoof commercials, NPR pledge drive spots from the Star Wars radio drama box set, and whatnot.) That’s the beauty of an MP3 player program (in my case, Winamp) that allows you to playlist whatever the heck you please. It’s Earl-FM.
I knew my whole way of thinking shifted one day this past week when my copy of the Firefly soundtrack arrived in the mail – and I yanked it out of the shrinkwrap and stuck it in the computer, and then put it back in the jewel case and then into my bag to take to work on the off-chance I’d have time to listen to it there.
So it’s happened to me too. My poor old CD player, much as I love its blinky yellow LCD lights and its keypad and its remote control, just isn’t seeing as much action these days.
Oh, and with roughly 80% of my CD collection ripped, only about 25% of my hard drive is in use – and that includes applications, this entire site, Windows XP, tons of photos, and other documents that aren’t music.
Man, I love computers.
I know the feeling… It took me a long time to go from cassettes to CDs. Even thought I had a CD player, I spent most of the 90s buying audio tapes.
Portable-wise, I was a cassette walkman user till 3 years ago. Then, at Christmas 2002, I got a Sony Discman. I liked it but… it didn’t play MP3s. A couple of months later I got a Creative CD-MP3 discman. I found it very frustrating to use (CD-MP3s being prone to the same problems as regular CDs, namely dust, scratches and the hassle of changing discs on-the-go). After 6 months, I splurged on an iPod. I haven’t looked back since.
When I moved in September, I left behind all my audio tapes and some of the CDs I didn’t care much about. The bulk of my CD collection was already transferred digitally, both on my iMac and my iPod. As a result, when I listen to music at home, it’s on my computer. On the go and at work, it’s on my iPod.
Frankly, the only CDs I really want to keep are those from my very favorite bands (like all my Smashing Pumpkins albums) or albums that hold some kind of sentimental value (like Weird Al).
Another reason I’m rapidly becoming enamoured of the “everything on the hard drive” way of listening to music is that I’m seriously considering backing up my entire music collection to dual-layer DVD-Rs. Scary thing is, I fired up Nero Burning ROM to do a “dummy run” and see how many discs all these lovely MP3s would take up…and it came up to something like 18 dual-layer DVD-Rs with everything ripped at a bitrate of 160. !!! But I do want to invest in the blank media for the backup at some point, because I have a lot of stuff that’s absolutely irreplaceable – out-of-print, imports, out-of-print imports, you get the idea. Even if something happened to the original discs, I’d still have the material that was on them. I suppose that gets into an ethical/copyright grey area, but I’m not talking about handing copies out to anyone – just an if-all-else-fails backup of what probably adds up to a few thousand dollars worth of CDs.