A musical interlude

We need some feedback on the communications issue, so I’ll leave that for a minute and see if we actually get any more responses. I know CP has something (undoubtedly wrong) in mind, and one does need to hear from MB…

So, another subject entirely. Music storage.

Okay, first of all, I have music I’ve purchased going back to the Dark Ages. I don’t have my 45s anymore (I’m still fuming over their “promotion” by a bunch of lowlife politicos in college who thought they would serve us well as an election ploy if we donated them to the local coffee shop; that they were mine and that I was never consulted is the issue—grrrrrr!). My LPs are in the chez basement: the sleeves aren’t in very good shape (the original Siamese, Minx, considered them the perfect scratching post) and God knows what shape the vinyl is in. I’ve got a few hundred cassettes left after cherry-picking the good ones for mp3ing; I’ve just sorted these remaining tapes into categories, and will salvage what I can over the next few months. I’ve got skadoodles of CDs going back to their invention (I was a relatively early adapter), many of which I’ve ripped into mp3s. And I’ve got mp3s acquired various (legal) ways; members of the VCA know well my stance on intellectual property, and the immorality of claiming that easy access somehow warrants theft. (Keep in mind, by the way, that I do not claim that all music, or whatever, must be kept in tightly held copyrights, but merely that the owners of intellectual property get to decide what to do with it. They’re perfectly within their rights to give it away, or not. The issue of when copyright ought to expire, and why, is a different one, and quite fascinating, but that’s for another time.)

So, in other words, I’ve got music up the wazoo, including a whole bunch of unripped CDs. My friend Peter, who is a nut worthy of being a forensician, and who makes the concept of obsessive look like casual disdain, has even more music and a bigger wazoo, but only came to the mp3 universe a few months ago with the purchase of his first iPod. He originally started ripping everything he owned in the lossless format, until he realized that this would only capture a fraction of his collection, and, additionally, he couldn’t tell the difference when he listened to stuff. So he went back and did it all mp3-style. When I demonstrated the “Remote” app to him (using the Touch to play iTunes throughout the house), he discovered that, unlike him, I hadn’t ripped my entire CD collection. “Why not?” he asked. “Why?” I riposted wittily. “Because it’s there,” he explained. Which got me thinking. Certainly at any point in the conceivable future I have more music than I can reasonably fit onto even the biggest iPod, but I could quite easily get myself one Big Sucker hard drive for the house at least for regular AirPort listening. And I could simply create a playlist of oodles of it for my MegaPod as I do now for the Touch.

Meanwhile, I’ve been spending a lot of time getting all my mp3 music into one library. Having added drives over the years and been sort of sloppy on occasion means that I have music spread out all over the place. As far as I know there’s no easy way to solve this short of laboriously finding the tracks and moving them physically album by album. But this process has convinced me of the goodness of the idea of a terabyte drive devoted entirely to music storage. So, I’ve been studying the available products, most of which look roughly identical: if it doesn’t die the first week, you’re fine. Whenever I have bought the biggest drive possible it has always cost about $125, and that remains true. The drives get bigger, the dollar gets smaller, but the price remains the same—curious economics which seem to apply to almost all computer-related purchases. Anyhow, I should have a 1T drive picked out and ordered by the end of the weekend, and then I’ll have something to continue to play with over the summer.

And this, gentle reader, is what people do at night when debate season is over and they’re not involved in any summer institutes.