As is so often the case when technology makes a great leap forward, I’m late to the party.
Until a few weeks ago, there I was, happily curating various playlists in iTunes the same way I’d been doing since the second generation iPod came out. I know. I might as well be here confessing I was still using Winamp to whip the llama’s ass.
Anyway. I’d been doing it that way for so long it was dead easy simple and reliable. It probably helped that I was mostly listening to the same music that’s been on my playlists for 20 years with only the occasional infusions of currently popular stuff. It wasn’t as if these playlists demanded a lot of time.
Lately, though, I’ve been a bit enchanted with a couple of artists – several with extensive catalogs – and I wasn’t particularly eager to buy up a few hundred dollars’ worth of digital albums to round out my collection on iTunes. Here enters Spotify with its three months for free introductory offer. Almost as if the great marketers in the machine knew the issue I was having and were prepared instantly to offer a $10 a month solution to get me out of that particular jam.
I still think owning the media is the preferable mode of doing things. Going to just owning the digital copy from owning the physical disks was a big step for me. Signing with Spotify and suddenly not owning any of it at all was something of a quantum leap. I still don’t love the idea that content can disappear or be edited instantly, but for sheer convenience, the streaming world really is hard to beat.
I am, somewhat begrudgingly, a fan.
Tag Archives: iPod
Tuning in…
A few days ago, I went digging thought iTunes for a few songs that I hadn’t heard in a while. After years of being transferred from computer to computer, to external hard drives, and being tweaked, curated, and edited to the extreme, it seems that iTunes has been slowly leaking. Some of my favorite albums, carefully imported from CD seven or eight years ago before all my shiny plastic disks went to live in a couple of large cardboard boxes, were nowhere to be seen. Some had just one or two songs. I’m guessing that I “lost” half my music collection before I really started to notice it… as much a fan as I am of going all electronic, I’m suddenly glad that I didn’t sell those disks off for a buck or two a piece years ago.
So now, while I had planned on spending a good part of the day getting mt tax stuff together, I’m most likely going to be sitting here swapping out disks every two minutes until balance is restored. It’s ok. Once it’s done, the music will end up being saved as part of my ridiculously over complicated double redundant back up scheme. Then again, if I don’t have to do this again in seven years, it’s probably worth the effort.
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