Actually listening to music again, pt 2
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Here's the sequel to part 1[1]. In that entry I described how I came
extremely close to buying a cheap used CD player and using a
combination of my local library and dirt cheap used CDs to facilitate
broadening my musical horizons without having to do business with
Google, Apple or Amazon or using propritary software that won't run
natively on my OSes of choice. One of the reasons I eventually
decided not to was that I bought a MiniDisc[2] player instead!
Depending on where you're from, this might require more or less
explanation. The MiniDisc technology was differentially successfully
around the world. It was a huge success in its native Japan and
became an entirely mainstream music format. It was moderately
successful in Europe but never really made it big. It was a total
commercial failure in the United States. I haven't read anything on
exactly how it did in Australia, in terms of actual numbers, but I
managed to literally never even see one or hear about them during
their hey day (not that I payed close attention to music technology
back then) which I guess says a lot.
Anyway, they were invented by Sony as a replacement for the casette
tape as a format that consumers could record to, back in the days when
CDs were still strictly a read-only format for home users. They are
kind of like the ultimate merger of tapes and CDs: like tapes, you can
very easily record stuff to them using the same device you listen to
them with, just by plugging the device into a radio, tape deck, CD
player, or microphone. So they inherit the "DIY" aspect of casette
tapes and you can easily make MD "mix tapes". But unlike tapes and
like CDs, they're digital, so the sound quality is much better, and
you can "tape over" an MD with new content as many times as you like
(well, up to a million times according to Sony's marketing) without
any degredation of quality at all. Also like CDs they are random
access and track-based, so you can skip tracks easily rather than
having to fast forward through an undivided linear audio stream. You
can even delete individual tracks, change their order around, etc.
Most MDs can hold 74 minutes of audio at standard "SP" quality, but
like VHS tapes you can sacrifice quality for playtime at hold double
that in LP2 mode or four times in LP4. They're really quite unlike
anything else, and must have seemed futuristic as *hell* back in the
90s.
I'll freely admit that a large part of my motivation to buy one was
sheer curiosity about and fascination with these strange little
things, which look like the shrunken lovechild of a CD and a 3.5"
floppy disk. I try very hard to not to buy new consumer electronics
devices because I think the vast majority are designed and built in
such a way that they become obsolete or damaged beyond economical
repair way, way too quickly for the tremendous environmental impact of
manufacturing them to be reasonably considered "paid back" by utility.
So I satisfy my natural geeky instincts by buying and using obsolete
tech that's otherwise in danger of ending up as landfill. Not
willy-nilly, mind you, I stick to stuff that I think I'll genuinely
use and which does its job well, maybe even in some ways better than
modern equivalents.
But beyond the retro-tech fasincation, I also think this thing will
genuinely help out in my musical quest. Even though as soon as it
became possible I very quickly switched to ripping all my music CDs
to mp3 (using, by the way, the wonderful, wonderful `abcd` tool) and
playing my entire collection in random shuffle mode while at my
computer (a terrible way to really listen to music, but I had such
narrow taste back then this provided a fairly cohesive listening
experience most of the time), I think I still kept anchored to my
music collection because I couldn't listen to it this way on the go.
While taking the train to and from university as a student (almost an
hour each way) I at first listened to CDs on my portable CD player,
and then later on I got my first mp3 player, a cute little red
plastic thing by iRiver which held a whopping 256MB, so it could fit a
few albums on there but certainly not a whole collection. This meant
I was regularly rotating through small subsets of my collection, and
whenever I bought a new album it spent a good bit of time in that
rotation so I still had a chance to experience it as a cohesive, well,
experience, over and over again, before it got assimilated into the
giant random shuffle pile.
At some point it became so easy to carry an entire collection with you
that I started basically doing *nothing* but random shuffling through
huge piles and I think this has really hindered my efforts to get
enthusiastic about new music. When I first started getting really
burned out on my old ripped-from-CD metal library, I talked to a few
friends about it, asking for suggestions. One of my friends at the
time was a big post-rock fan, a genre I'd never even heard of. She
played me a few tracks and I kind of liked it, so I gave her the USB
drive off my keychain and she immediately dumped a few gigs of the
stuff on there. Then I took it home and random shuffled through the
whole thing. At this point I've probably heard every song she gave
me a hundred times or more, but I couldn't name one of them if you
played it to me, and although I could name a couple of artists I don't
have a good sense of who is who or how anybody's sound evolved over
time or anything like that.
I think it's really important that I start consuming music in small,
structured doses again, like I used to when that limitation was forced
upon me by physical media. So...why not actually use physical media
for exactly that reason? Yes, I could just stop being such a lazy
user of digital music technology and curate playlists and pick
specific albums to play, etc. But, honestly, at this point I have a
personal laptop, a work laptop, and a smartphone, and keeping both a
music library *and* a set of playlists synchronised across all those
devices is just way more hassle than I want to deal with, and I know
without even looking that all the smart phone software for doing this
will be garbage because, well, it's smart phone software. Having a
single portable music device I use everywhere just makes my life
simpler.
So my plan now is to maintain a large digital library on my personal
laptop only, and record from it to a small collection of MDs (no more
than 10 - the 10 disc project from last post lives on!) which will be
my primary means of actually listening to it. I suspect I'll have
some discs dedicated permanently, or very long term, to favourite
artists, one disc which I constantly record over with my most recent
bandcamp purchases so I can spend quality time with them, and some
"mixtape" discs with assorted music of a particular genre or mood
which can evolve slowly over time as I add and remove tracks -
physical playlists, basically. Having to pick music to record to
discs, having to pick discs to listen to and having to change them
out when I get bored will require me to think a lot more carefully
about what's in my collection, what goes well with what, what I'm in
the mood for, and generally be a whole lot more involved in the
process than random shuffling an entire library or tuning in to an
internet stream and paying no attention to what's playing.
Worst case scenario, I get tired of the whole thing and re-sell the
player and discs for something close to what I paid for it to somebody
else who is interested in obsolete technology. It won't be difficult.
But so far, I'm pretty smitten with this device (a Sony MZ-R700, by
the way). I've written before[3] about how much I hate the fact that
proprietary, non-replacable lithium batteries doom so many otherwise
serviceable consumer electronic devices to a premature end of life.
My MD player runs on a single AA battery, I shit you not. This is
not a solid state memory device, this is a thing that spins physical
media with a motor! It has a laser and a magnetic head in it. And
yet it runs on one AA, with Sony quoting 46 hours playing time (at
LP2 quality, which is good enough for my ears) off one battery.
It's possible if you use really high quality modern batteries like
Panasonic's Eneloops, you could do even better than this (although
I can't say I've actually tried this). This is kind of like how by
putting modern film emulsions in old cameras you can take better
(in some ways) photos with them than you could in their hey day,
because the standardised format means that technological advances
are entirely back-portable to older devices.
I have to say, after being indoctrinated by years of "smart" devices
which need recharing of their proprietary batteries every day, or
every second day at best, and then eventually every half day as the
battery starts to stop holding charge and you nervously start trying
to find a genuine replacement at a sane price, it seems like pure
friggin' magic to buy an almost 20 year old device, to have
absolutely no trouble at all finding and cheaply buying a brand new,
high quality, Japanese-made rechargable battery for it which is 100%
compatible, and then get almost two straight days of playback out of
it (i.e. easily a week of regular listening). We have genuinely lost
something really important from our user experience.
It's true a lot of early mp3 players - including, actually, my cute
little red iRiver from earlier in this post - ran on AAs or AAAs.
They probably would offer even longer life than my MD player. But a
goodly percentage of those would have needed proprietary USB cables to
upload music to them, long since lost by the original owner, and/or
would require proprietary software that only runs on Windows XP or a
contemporary Apple OS. This thing records, no computer necessary,
from anything you like, either analogue sources via a 3.5mm line in or
digital sources via TOSLINK optical cable. It feels supernaturally
future-proof. Yeah, it has moving parts and one day the motor will
burn out or the laser will get knocked out of alignment, or something.
But it won't be killed by battery issues like most new devices sold
this year will, and it won't be killed by shifting standards in
computer OSes or interface cables, or discontuation of firmware
updates from the manufacturer, like the remainder will. It will be a
genuinely useful portable audio player and recorder up until the day
it physically wears out. If you can't get excited by that kind of
tech, what the hell is wrong with you?
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/actually-listening-to-music-again-1.txt
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
[3]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/lithium-blues.txt
