I love music.
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Join Date: 2006-10-31 Member: 58103Members
Join Date: 2006-10-31 Member: 58103Members
in Off-Topic
<div class="IPBDescription">A tale of cassettes and command lines.</div>After being in college for a few years, out on my own if you will, I have come to an important conclusion: I love music. I've massed countless cds, mixtapes, mp3 collections, and even a few stately vinyls in my time here at school. Looking at the varied media and even more varied genres, I've come to a point that I would have never thought of even two years ago. I'm seeing seeds planted years ago rooting themselves into a more fertile environment and a bit of myself injected into my music collection.
The Early Years: Molded by Classic Rock
When I was younger, I remember an era composed mostly of vinyls around the house. Be it a worn copy of Meet The Beatles or a thick set of Karajan. Our stereo at home was fairly good, with your standard quarter-inch headphone jack and liberal amounts of faux-chrome and faux-woodgrain finish. I remember as a child messing with the small lever that would raise and lower the tone arm without the inpercise touch of a human being. I remember switching a 33 to the 45 setting and listning to my latest Chipmunk creation.
It was all very personal.
I'd sift through my parents collection of a healthy mix of classical and classic rock. One day Beethoven, another day Zeppelin. As a kid I'd love to watch the turntable's arm slowly work it's way inward, until the final length of groove tripped the mechanism to return the arm. It all seemed very magical as a child, seeing such "complex" mechanical movement done entirely automatically.
Then the era of vinyl came to a close. Record stores quickly turned into CD shops as the recording industry suspended the luxury of buypacks for unbought vinyls. Me and my father went to the local Sears for a CD component.
I remember all sorts of wacky CD drives, as this was the early 90s and CDs were still somewhat novel. I remember a CD component that used something similar to today's computer CD drives, a simple tray. But the tray was double length, with one CD behind the other. Odd. Other devices were mostly single-CD drives.
Then there were the changers. At the time jukebox components were nonexistant at the consumer level from what I remember, but changers were the bees knees. Going from listening to 20 minutes of music per record side to 300+ minutes in a changer was like night and day. We picked up a five CD-changer and went home with the newly bought booty. It's still used today. With a heavily constructed metal body and overbuilt components it still happily plays away.
My family quickly massed a CD collection, just like everybody else of that era. I took a liking to the REM albums I found, listening to them with giant metal headphones from generations past. Automatic For the People topped out my child listening charts. I'd also love listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Imagine a child listening to DSoTM with a pair of hefty metal headphones.
From there I stagnated in my musical tastes. CDs were expensive, and the only "new" music i'd hear would be off the radio. And most of the time I couldn't figure out what the song was. I remember one song really struck well with me, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it was. Years later I'd find out that it was "White Room." A Clapton fan from the start, who knew.
Being In School: Cluelessness will be punished.
Another era of music in my life is probably when I was in school. I guess students of the day took the phrase "knowledge is power" a bit too seriously and would poke fun whenver I didn't know one of their trendy bands. All music from the era was more or less lost on me, and I stuck with my trusty fallbacks. REM, Pink Floyd, I think even a bit of The Doors. Not something that should be divulged to other school children.
In the late 90s I finally had access to a computer powerful enough to start to do cool things. Games, internet, etc. I found out about a thing called MP3 and took to transcoding all my favorite CDs into the computer. At the time I used Real Jukebox, which was limited to 96kbits/sec, and put my entire CD favorites onto one MP3 CD. At the time nobody thought it was useful in any way. Just a big waste of time. Everybody I knew at school thought it was also a waste, and took no short time in saying that I was a big nerd and that I should just use a CD player.
Breaking Out: Napster and P2P
At this point Napster hit mainstream. School was abuzz with people trading back and forth. The tech unsavvy finally saw a reason to be tech savvy. Probably the biggest impact of Napster was that it spelled the end of The Album as we know it. This is both good and bad, as people no longer had to put up with horrid filler tracks to listen to their favorite One Hit Wonder. At the same time, however, good bands were being judged by one or two tracks, with tons of great works falling by the wayside. For example Zeppelin became "Stairway to Heaven." The Offspring became "Pretty Fly" and Radiohead became "Creep." Each of these bands, in my opinion, have tracks much better than their hits. But those exposed to them in Napster era never got the chance to listen to the bands as a whole. Shared directories became cesspools of MTV hits of the time.
But for me, file sharing gave something much more important: breakout. After being in a bit of a rut for years, I was finally exposed to new kinds of music. I listened to Plush, I listened to Optimistic. Seeds of music planted firmly into my head. I experienced new sounds, new favorites, my listening tastes branched out hugely. At my personal level the era of filesharing has caused me to give more money to the music industry than I ever would have. It proved that good music is out there, and I intended to find it.
A couple years later the era of mainstream filesharing came to a close. People never used to have to know about copyright. Now they do. Something that used to be the realm of big corporations and mickey mouse finally hit Average Joe America. Many many people stopped filesharing after a few years.
But this had a large impact on music as a whole: The magic was gone.
What used to be somewhat of a magical process, the turntable's tone arm, the record grooves, loading a CD, watching the counter on the CD player tick upwards... it all used to be mystic to the average consumer. Now people could quantify music. The magic was gone. Music was something they could load onto their computer. Something they could manipulate. They could open up a track in Goldwave and see what it looked like. They could see how much harddrive space was taken up by their entire music collection. They could finally quanitify what music was. No longer a plastic or vinyl disc, now bits and bytes.
Music, through the demystification of filesharing, became devalued.
It wasn't that people could get an entire album off of their favorite illicit service, it was that albums were no longer worth what they used to be. In a way P2P became a competitor to the recording cartels. I think a lot of people used to put stock in the price of a CD just because of how amazing the medium was. Now people can see just how cheap the distribution of music can be. Anybody could do it. People backlashed. They didn't understand why a CD was as expensive as it was. Any old joe could now distribute a song for free. Why didn't such a revolution cut costs of music?
Eventually music CD costs were cut to compete. People don't think that a CD is worth $20 anymore. A full length feature movie on DVD costs less than $20 in almost every case. 2+ hours of special effects and visual/audio stimulation costs less than $20. Why should ~60 minutes of music cost more?
Another effect of file sharing was that "the album" became extinct. Nobody listens to an entire album anymore. Mix CDs became the norm, splicing hits from all over the place. I say that artistically that the move away from albums is the greatest loss of modern music.
That child listening to Dark Side of the Moon wouldn't exist today. Would he just listen to Money? Time? Would he bother to see the brilliance of the album as a whole?
College Years: Straying from the norm... again. cmd style.
So as I went off to college, I was sure to rip every CD in my house. Carrying around a load of CDs wasn't practical anymore. But by then I had become competent enough to ditch Real Jukebox. My ripper then/now is EAC. I had become a quality maven. Pops and clicks would burn into my soul like a dog wearing shoes. It just wasn't meant to be. I would rip and listen, make sure that each copy was perfect. I would use LAME at alt standard, I would sit and watch the command windows pop up and disappear as each track was encoded to my liking. I left for school with a hard drive full of tunes.
But I also had lost the value of The Album. All of my tracks were separated by album, but the albums themselves were not preserved. No playlists, no track ID3 tags.
Then I bought OK Computer.
I went to the local shop and decided I'd get an album. I remembered listening to Optimistic and Idioteque and other KidA favorites and I decided I'd go with Radiohead. OK Computer seemed to jump at me, so I bought it.
After listening to it in ripped form (which just sorted tracks alphabetically) I finally realized that the original track listing made the experience so much more satisfying. So I started to tag all my music. I made playlists of each album that would preserve the original track listing and put them all in a big directory. I almost never listened to just one track anymore, I'd have to listen to a whole album. For me The Album was coming back, and I was hungry for more.
After that my physical Cd collection grew. The Bends, KidA, Stone Temple Pilots... I branched out into weirder music. Mr. Scruff, Kasabian, Boards of Canada, Bonobo, Amon Tobin, more Pink Floyd, Muse. Before I knew it I had a bona-fide CD collection. A physical set of plastic that had weight and art. I initially used the CDs just as ripping devices for my computer based collection, but eventually I realized how much I missed the physical connection to music.
Time Travel: A Stereo
So at my next trip home, I dug up an old stereo. Very Old. But what makes it unique is that for it's compact size it has a turntable, CD, and a cassette deck. Everything i'd ever want. I'd load CDs, watch the counter tick up just like old times. Marvel in the gapless track changes. Fool with the old faulty switches that would cut out the left or right speaker now and then.
Everybody finally switched from CDs to mp3s, just like I did in the late 90s, and now i'm switching back. And just like my switch to mp3s, nobody can see the point in it. In an age of Ipods and cheap external hard drives, who holds a CD anymore? Who knows songs by their track number rather than their name?
The other week I decided I'd take the last step, I got some vinyl. Eric Clapton's "Slow Hand" to be exact. I took the old stereo and reattached the long-ago fallen off motor belt. It was neat to see the mechanism for returning the arm after it reached the middle of the record. No longer magic. Ah, the intimacy. Putting the tone arm on the take-off area of the record. Watching it move inward, flipping the switch from 33 to 45, turning the record over after 20 minutes. What atmosphere.
Thumping bass and a playlist may make a good party, but pops and clicks and a few friends makes life chill.
So I love music. I love the journey, I love the art. I love picking out a new CD i've never heard of and giving it a listen. Like exploring a new world.
Take back music. Make it less sterile. Make it your own.
The Early Years: Molded by Classic Rock
When I was younger, I remember an era composed mostly of vinyls around the house. Be it a worn copy of Meet The Beatles or a thick set of Karajan. Our stereo at home was fairly good, with your standard quarter-inch headphone jack and liberal amounts of faux-chrome and faux-woodgrain finish. I remember as a child messing with the small lever that would raise and lower the tone arm without the inpercise touch of a human being. I remember switching a 33 to the 45 setting and listning to my latest Chipmunk creation.
It was all very personal.
I'd sift through my parents collection of a healthy mix of classical and classic rock. One day Beethoven, another day Zeppelin. As a kid I'd love to watch the turntable's arm slowly work it's way inward, until the final length of groove tripped the mechanism to return the arm. It all seemed very magical as a child, seeing such "complex" mechanical movement done entirely automatically.
Then the era of vinyl came to a close. Record stores quickly turned into CD shops as the recording industry suspended the luxury of buypacks for unbought vinyls. Me and my father went to the local Sears for a CD component.
I remember all sorts of wacky CD drives, as this was the early 90s and CDs were still somewhat novel. I remember a CD component that used something similar to today's computer CD drives, a simple tray. But the tray was double length, with one CD behind the other. Odd. Other devices were mostly single-CD drives.
Then there were the changers. At the time jukebox components were nonexistant at the consumer level from what I remember, but changers were the bees knees. Going from listening to 20 minutes of music per record side to 300+ minutes in a changer was like night and day. We picked up a five CD-changer and went home with the newly bought booty. It's still used today. With a heavily constructed metal body and overbuilt components it still happily plays away.
My family quickly massed a CD collection, just like everybody else of that era. I took a liking to the REM albums I found, listening to them with giant metal headphones from generations past. Automatic For the People topped out my child listening charts. I'd also love listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Imagine a child listening to DSoTM with a pair of hefty metal headphones.
From there I stagnated in my musical tastes. CDs were expensive, and the only "new" music i'd hear would be off the radio. And most of the time I couldn't figure out what the song was. I remember one song really struck well with me, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it was. Years later I'd find out that it was "White Room." A Clapton fan from the start, who knew.
Being In School: Cluelessness will be punished.
Another era of music in my life is probably when I was in school. I guess students of the day took the phrase "knowledge is power" a bit too seriously and would poke fun whenver I didn't know one of their trendy bands. All music from the era was more or less lost on me, and I stuck with my trusty fallbacks. REM, Pink Floyd, I think even a bit of The Doors. Not something that should be divulged to other school children.
In the late 90s I finally had access to a computer powerful enough to start to do cool things. Games, internet, etc. I found out about a thing called MP3 and took to transcoding all my favorite CDs into the computer. At the time I used Real Jukebox, which was limited to 96kbits/sec, and put my entire CD favorites onto one MP3 CD. At the time nobody thought it was useful in any way. Just a big waste of time. Everybody I knew at school thought it was also a waste, and took no short time in saying that I was a big nerd and that I should just use a CD player.
Breaking Out: Napster and P2P
At this point Napster hit mainstream. School was abuzz with people trading back and forth. The tech unsavvy finally saw a reason to be tech savvy. Probably the biggest impact of Napster was that it spelled the end of The Album as we know it. This is both good and bad, as people no longer had to put up with horrid filler tracks to listen to their favorite One Hit Wonder. At the same time, however, good bands were being judged by one or two tracks, with tons of great works falling by the wayside. For example Zeppelin became "Stairway to Heaven." The Offspring became "Pretty Fly" and Radiohead became "Creep." Each of these bands, in my opinion, have tracks much better than their hits. But those exposed to them in Napster era never got the chance to listen to the bands as a whole. Shared directories became cesspools of MTV hits of the time.
But for me, file sharing gave something much more important: breakout. After being in a bit of a rut for years, I was finally exposed to new kinds of music. I listened to Plush, I listened to Optimistic. Seeds of music planted firmly into my head. I experienced new sounds, new favorites, my listening tastes branched out hugely. At my personal level the era of filesharing has caused me to give more money to the music industry than I ever would have. It proved that good music is out there, and I intended to find it.
A couple years later the era of mainstream filesharing came to a close. People never used to have to know about copyright. Now they do. Something that used to be the realm of big corporations and mickey mouse finally hit Average Joe America. Many many people stopped filesharing after a few years.
But this had a large impact on music as a whole: The magic was gone.
What used to be somewhat of a magical process, the turntable's tone arm, the record grooves, loading a CD, watching the counter on the CD player tick upwards... it all used to be mystic to the average consumer. Now people could quantify music. The magic was gone. Music was something they could load onto their computer. Something they could manipulate. They could open up a track in Goldwave and see what it looked like. They could see how much harddrive space was taken up by their entire music collection. They could finally quanitify what music was. No longer a plastic or vinyl disc, now bits and bytes.
Music, through the demystification of filesharing, became devalued.
It wasn't that people could get an entire album off of their favorite illicit service, it was that albums were no longer worth what they used to be. In a way P2P became a competitor to the recording cartels. I think a lot of people used to put stock in the price of a CD just because of how amazing the medium was. Now people can see just how cheap the distribution of music can be. Anybody could do it. People backlashed. They didn't understand why a CD was as expensive as it was. Any old joe could now distribute a song for free. Why didn't such a revolution cut costs of music?
Eventually music CD costs were cut to compete. People don't think that a CD is worth $20 anymore. A full length feature movie on DVD costs less than $20 in almost every case. 2+ hours of special effects and visual/audio stimulation costs less than $20. Why should ~60 minutes of music cost more?
Another effect of file sharing was that "the album" became extinct. Nobody listens to an entire album anymore. Mix CDs became the norm, splicing hits from all over the place. I say that artistically that the move away from albums is the greatest loss of modern music.
That child listening to Dark Side of the Moon wouldn't exist today. Would he just listen to Money? Time? Would he bother to see the brilliance of the album as a whole?
College Years: Straying from the norm... again. cmd style.
So as I went off to college, I was sure to rip every CD in my house. Carrying around a load of CDs wasn't practical anymore. But by then I had become competent enough to ditch Real Jukebox. My ripper then/now is EAC. I had become a quality maven. Pops and clicks would burn into my soul like a dog wearing shoes. It just wasn't meant to be. I would rip and listen, make sure that each copy was perfect. I would use LAME at alt standard, I would sit and watch the command windows pop up and disappear as each track was encoded to my liking. I left for school with a hard drive full of tunes.
But I also had lost the value of The Album. All of my tracks were separated by album, but the albums themselves were not preserved. No playlists, no track ID3 tags.
Then I bought OK Computer.
I went to the local shop and decided I'd get an album. I remembered listening to Optimistic and Idioteque and other KidA favorites and I decided I'd go with Radiohead. OK Computer seemed to jump at me, so I bought it.
After listening to it in ripped form (which just sorted tracks alphabetically) I finally realized that the original track listing made the experience so much more satisfying. So I started to tag all my music. I made playlists of each album that would preserve the original track listing and put them all in a big directory. I almost never listened to just one track anymore, I'd have to listen to a whole album. For me The Album was coming back, and I was hungry for more.
After that my physical Cd collection grew. The Bends, KidA, Stone Temple Pilots... I branched out into weirder music. Mr. Scruff, Kasabian, Boards of Canada, Bonobo, Amon Tobin, more Pink Floyd, Muse. Before I knew it I had a bona-fide CD collection. A physical set of plastic that had weight and art. I initially used the CDs just as ripping devices for my computer based collection, but eventually I realized how much I missed the physical connection to music.
Time Travel: A Stereo
So at my next trip home, I dug up an old stereo. Very Old. But what makes it unique is that for it's compact size it has a turntable, CD, and a cassette deck. Everything i'd ever want. I'd load CDs, watch the counter tick up just like old times. Marvel in the gapless track changes. Fool with the old faulty switches that would cut out the left or right speaker now and then.
Everybody finally switched from CDs to mp3s, just like I did in the late 90s, and now i'm switching back. And just like my switch to mp3s, nobody can see the point in it. In an age of Ipods and cheap external hard drives, who holds a CD anymore? Who knows songs by their track number rather than their name?
The other week I decided I'd take the last step, I got some vinyl. Eric Clapton's "Slow Hand" to be exact. I took the old stereo and reattached the long-ago fallen off motor belt. It was neat to see the mechanism for returning the arm after it reached the middle of the record. No longer magic. Ah, the intimacy. Putting the tone arm on the take-off area of the record. Watching it move inward, flipping the switch from 33 to 45, turning the record over after 20 minutes. What atmosphere.
Thumping bass and a playlist may make a good party, but pops and clicks and a few friends makes life chill.
So I love music. I love the journey, I love the art. I love picking out a new CD i've never heard of and giving it a listen. Like exploring a new world.
Take back music. Make it less sterile. Make it your own.
Comments
My musical life was defined by the internet though. I grew up with radically christian parents. You know the kind, all music is evil if it doesn't mention Jesus and his 50-some disciples every other word. So, my computer allowed me to secret away music.
So, in a way, I owe a large deal of my brain to MP3's and filesharing.
CD's are rather bulky though, and for a college student, this is bad news.
Obviously, the onset of the portable mp3 player (and even some of the non-portable ones... Looking specifically at the "hard drive with an mp3 player attached to it" Archos Jukebox...) were really the death of the CD player, it a portable, and non-portable form. I would take my trusty walkman to college, blaring out whatever disc I decided to put in there. Then I'd see a classmate pull this technological marvel out of his pocket... The first generation iPod. He didn't have to worry about changing CD, if he wanted to listen to just one track from the album, he could skip through them all, playing a single track from the multitude of albums he'd loaded onto it. But still, I preferred opening up the CD player, taking the fragile disc out, picking a new one, flicking through the 30 or so CD's I'd carry around with me, much like a DJ at a party would flick through a huge collection, to find that one perfect song that they wanted to play.
Even though it was inconvient, it was nostalgic. I'd been brought up listening to tapes, and a good section of vinyl. Beutifully preserved vinyl as well, plastic sleeves, only ever taken out to go straight into the turntable, then played to the end, never interrupted, and never overplayed. Then straight back into the cover, and into the heavy box that they were stored in. The technology wasn't going to win me over. I had my CDs, and that was that...
It was around that kind of time that I first bought a decent CD writer. Finally, I could make my own mixdiscs, and taken them into college, to be the proud owner of a custom album, like I used to do in middle school with tapes, I was finally doing with CDs. After that, I was king of the custom disc. Yet still, after a week, the same old mixes just became like another album. I wanted more. I wanted true randomness in what I listen to. I wanted one of those sleek little white things with the circular scroll, and central button...
By this point, I'd finished with college, and walked into my job as a PC engineer. One of the girls I worked with, her husband was selling his old Gen1 iPod. Which I bought off of her, and subsequently loaded every damn mp3 file in my collection onto iTunes, as AAC. Even though my collection of CDs was huge (for me), it only filled up about a 1/4 of this 20GB iPod...
A couple of years went past, and my iPod died after being forced to update the firmware, it died in the middle of it. No more mp3 player... So i went back to my silent bus journeys to and from work. Until I decided enough was enough. I'd had my eye on the o2XDA mobile phone/PDA, and its ability to play mp3 files. Which I then bought, slid in a spare 1GB SD card, and loaded my favourite 5 albums onto it. Where they remain to this day.
Back with the CDs? All I do with them is to rip them directly to the PC, put them back in the shelves, where they can be safe, and scratch free. Ok, so it's not quite the same as listening to them from the disc. However, the lost image of the time counter ticking up is long from dead on my PC. I use a Logitech G15 keyboard, with the LCD screen...
When I'm playing a game, or whatever, it's in clock mode. But when, I use Media Player to listen to music, it goes into media mode, and gives me a lovely time counter, ticking away the seconds, whilst I sit here, and either sing to the music, or just listen. Safe in the knowledge that I own nearly every album that this music comes from...
People who appreciate hard copy music aren't gone forever. We're just hard to find <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />