Actually listening to music again, pt 2

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