The iPod Reminiscence

 I am guilty of taking technological innovation for granted. I think we all become spoiled by the advent of minor things that were once a wonder as they trail away into the commonplace. I think about things like fuel injection which makes internal combustion engines much easier to start particularly in cold weather. I think about things like push button start for motorcycles which has eliminated the kick start entirely.  

In my lifetime music has had several evolutions. As a kid, I had cassette tapes. Cassettes were a decent technology used for music and digital storage. Yes, kids, once upon a time you could load up and play a video game using a cassette on your TRS-80 computer (amongst others.) I collected a fair few tapes along the way.

Around the time I turned ten CDs came into popular use. They had been around a while longer, but the transition happened slowly. I remember seeing the music selection at K-Mart have a few CDs on a display and later being revamped so that the CDs and cassettes were intermingled. It wouldn't be too many years before the tapes just were not available anymore. Hard to believe that CDs are fairly obsolete as well. 

I suppose it should not be. More than twenty years ago I fell in love with .mp3 files and the program Winamp (it really kicks the llama's ass!) This brought about an interesting time where my PC had a host of filesharing programs, CD encoders, and file labeling software. Having always been a music nut, I had a massive CD collection. 

I took a lot of pride in my music. It was alphabetized on a bookshelf in my living room. Before the .mp3, I had albums that rotated through my stereo's disc changer, albums (often duplicates) that rode around in my truck, and a few gems that were kept in sacred cellophane just in case I caught a scratch that could not be corrected. 

Speaking of innovation, let's talk quickly about CD scratches. One of the most frustrating thing was having a disc get damaged. I remember driving along and being cut off in traffic just as I was changing discs only to fumble my copy of Astrocreep 2000. I watched helplessly as it slid shiny side down across my truck floormats. I knew the disc was dead before I pulled over to rescue it on the side of the interstate. It was scratched beyond my CD buffer's ability to recover and I would go on to buy my fourth copy of that album. 

For the record the first copy had been a tape. The second copy was riding in my CD binder when I went too fast around a curve in my Chevelle and it slid prettily out the window. The third bit the dust on the floorboards of my F-150. The fourth would get imported into my digital library. I do not know why White Zombie didn't want to stay in my life, but the struggle was real. The digital files got lost TWICE and had to be encoded a few times. I finally gave up and bought the album digitally so I couldn't lose it. 

My PC ended up wired up to my stereo. Having so much music at my fingertips was the excuse to have multiple screens, bigger hard drives, and a faster system. I wanted to be able to game, play music, and do other more nefarious things simultaneously. These were the wild west days of Napster after all. Thank goodness none of that pirated music survives in my much more reputable music library now. This is me finding the silver lining in a couple of crashed hard drives. 

With music 'backed up' to digital, I was able to get rid of some of my duplicate albums. Around the time I started really believing this someone relieved me of several CDs from my BMW. They took music and the change from the coin organizer. It wasn't exactly the end of the world. It did make me wonder why I had stopped carrying my CD binder in my backpack when I went in somewhere. I bought a new binder and did that for a bit. 

Then everything changed. My parents gifted me a 20GB iPod. It held my music library with room to spare. I was slow to turn away from Winamp to iTunes after having built so many playlists. It happened over about a year. The CDs stayed in the vehicles, but I stopped carrying the binder and replaced it with an iPod and ear buds. 

Then came all of the adapters and connections for the iPod. I had a cassette deck adapter in the truck. I had an FM broadcasting cradle in the BMW. Eventually they got smaller and better... just about the time that phones started adding features for playing music. That would be the evolution that would eventually sideline the mp3 player in general and the iPod specifically. 

It is funny how twenty plus years later how primitive all of that seems. My ten year old car has a Bluetooth connection that lets me stream any media and phone calls directly from my phone. Most of the new models come with built in charging adapters for the phone. It also makes me wonder what will be the next evolution. We have gone from wired to wireless ear buds, but that doesn't feel that big a shift compared to cassette to CD to digital music. 

I have pretty well rejected streaming music because I would rather buy the songs I love than pay a subscription fee. I hope the future state is cooler than all that. Hopefully we will see.