Visitors that have read the bio on this blog may remember mention of a time at the start of the century when hominids awoke to not quite monolithic silver and white slabs, around which I declared to a friend that there was no need to carry around 5GB of music. Who on earth needed to carry hundreds of tracks, never mind thousands. Oh, how foolish was I?
That error in thinking was corrected within months, but now I’ve stepped it up to another level of obsession. Thanks to a quest for musical rediscovery spurred on by iTunes’ Genius feature, I recently succumbed to the acquisition of a 120GB iPod classic. Beneath its charcoal exterior (Apple calls it black, but its surface isn’t as deep and shiny as Agent Cooper’s damn fine coffee) is enough capacity that finally carries my entire iTunes library, at least after converting it from Apple Lossless to MP3. That’s, umm, over 12,000 tracks, though some are duplicates due to my obsessive tendencies towards more than a handful of artists. You can never have enough bags, shoes and mixes of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.
Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I use Apple Lossless as a backup measure rather than being swollen with aspirations of ever belonging to the group of people called audiophiles. Last year I discovered a double album that had succumbed to some kind of icky effect that made the data side of the discs look like magnified snowflake patterns. Ignoring that they were material goods, this was a rather alarming event.
Anyway, back to the iPod. Lovely shiny iPod. If only Apple has been able to introduce a 320GB or higher capacity iPod, or at least allow models other than the shuffle to transcode songs upon transfer, then I wouldn’t need to maintain two libraries. Even better, though the vast majority need only to keep their library at one quality, why not package high and low quality versions up into one file. That would also benefit HD and SD video (buy a TV show in HD and you get both by default – one for your big screen, the other for your iPod). iTunes treats their separate files as different episodes, so you have to manually indicate the SD version is not new even after watching the show in HD.
What’s up with the classic’s wheel and, on a related note, why the unpredictable alphabetical shortcuts that seems to crop up when you’re not expecting it, and not when you really want to nip to the end of the alphabet? It’s like someone invented the physical wheel, decided it was good for a few years, then thought that society could cope with a downgrade to straight planks of wood, rather than carve a well-formed arc to get travellers from A to Z within their lifetime. If the shortcut fails to kick in, try scrolling through a list of hundreds of artists. Takes a while, doesn’t it?
Bitching aside, it’s nice to have all of my music in one tiny box as my musical moods change faster than Samantha Jones’ boyfriends. I was tired of picking and choosing favourite tracks from albums to squish onto an old 30GB model only to find that I’d rather listen to the tracks that were discarded. Of course they’re long forgotten by the time I arrive home, and I’m buggered if I’ll rely on a Smart Playlist to fill her up. Otherwise I was heading for a disk full of hideous PWL-era Kylie remixes with a side order of Paula Abdul to really get me dancing in the street.
Hey, Straight Up is pure, enjoyable late ’80s tat. Don’t try to publicly shame me as I’m quite capable myself. Besides, I bet there’s far worse in your library. What’s that CD with the blue and pink spine? Betty Boo’s Boomania? Well, okay, I have that one too. Shush, and pay attention.
You’re probably questioning the need to carry around so much music. It’s over a month’s worth of listening… even accounting for delays on the Tube, the battery expire after just over a day.
All of these tracks are tied into Genius, and after some recent forays into Genius and Party Shuffle in iTunes, I felt it was time to rediscover rarely heard tracks. Genius came up with some excellent suggestions on the way into work earlier this week; David Byrne’s Lazy was followed by Björk’s Play Dead and Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain. Even Opus III’s It’s A Fine Day was a welcome departure considering the seed, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor was a step too far.
If your Genius feature remains switched off, I beg of you to turn it on. That way we can all look forward to better playlist generation and, unless you’re even more musically unstable than I am, maybe we can avoids these little hiccups. Quickly, now. Before my iPod uncovers that What Is Love? lurking in all 10.5mm of its depths.
