| Music Overload Advances in technology can be a blessing and a burden at the same time. On November 1, 2003, I joined the iPod generation when I purchased a 40 gigabyte capacity iPod. I was not anxious to join the iPod generation as I am not a fan of Macs nor Mac products, but a fellow ABBAMAILer based in Los-Angeles had one and I got the opportunity to talk to him about his iPod and how much he enjoys his player and I changed my mind and thought it might be a worthwhile investment. Upon investigation at that point in time, the iPods were the players with the largest capacity and the closest equivalent in a PC based product had only half the capacity. I knew 20 gigs was certainly not going to come close to holding my collection of music and I certainly had my doubts that even a 40 gig player would be able to hold everything in my collection. My only hesitation towards the iPod was that because it's from Apple, it wouldn't carry the capability to play Windows Media Files, which in itself is not much of a problem, but I do like to use that file format because I can keep songs sounding just as good as MP3s in approximately half the file size. While Apple provides it's own format, I wanted to stick with MP3s because I could later move the files onto a windows based machine if I find one at a later point in time that I'd much rather have than the iPod. Let's fast forward nine months the present, and I've filled 32.03 gigabytes and have a "measly" 5.12 gigs of free space left. (Yes, I know, 32.03 + 5.12 = 37.15 gigs, not 40 gigs, but that's because technology manufactures routinely lie about capacity and "round up". My opinion is you should never state a given amount of storage space unless the product actually holds that much or slightly more, unless you want to be sued. So I think Apple should have been wise to just call it a 36 gig capacity iPod.) Those 32.03 gigs consist of 5671 audio tracks and if left to play from the first song to the very last would run for 16.7 days without playing the same track twice. Now if they could just get the batteries to last that long. One of the neatest features that I had not expected to enjoy as much as I have, is the ability of the iPod to keep track of how many times you've played a song, which also can be used as a sort criteria. That feature only tracks plays done on the iPod and the iTunes software, so it doesn't give a complete picture, but I guess it a good gauge on how much mileage that song has been through on your player. At the moment, Agnetha's "If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind" is my most played song at 141 plays which isn't quite accurate, since the second most played song on my iPod is also Agnetha's "If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind," at 117 plays, but that version is the one I made from the first Internet broadcast and not one I've listened to since getting an officially released copy of the song to add to my player. I just feel a little sentimental about the night we had the online listening party to catch the first play of the song on Swedish radio, so I'm not quite ready to delete that not quite as nice sounding version. Besides, it's a bit of a novelty with the Rix-FM DJs talking in Swedish for a few seconds before and after the song. Getting back to the remaining 5.12 gigs of available space on the iPod, I can add approximately 1,000 more songs. I also know I could greatly free up some space on the iPod if I would convert the MP3s that are encoded at 192 kbps to smaller bit rates but I am more of a stickler for sound quality than the average person (but certainly not to the extent of true audiophiles.) But oddly enough, while I thought a 40 gig iPod would be close to holding "most" of my collection, I think the best I can hope for is a "sizeable chunk". I just look at my CD collection and see all these albums I have yet to add to the player and it just seems like such an insurmountable task. The only really bad part is that I was very impatient initially and spent a great deal of time loading up the player just to have some songs on it to play right away. Even though it's nine months later, I still feel like I'm in that impatient initial stage because I'm always finding more CDs in my collection that I just want to add now. Ideally, in a perfect world, I would have established a systematic plan of attack to completely level out every track, go in a specific order, and fill out all the track details and customize the track tags to meet my every whim for categorization. For example, I want to ultimately have every song described by type of music, what language it's being sung in, who wrote the song, what year it was released, whether the song is remix, whether the song is a live performance, and if the song is a cover who originally performed it, how much I like the song on a scale of five stars, etc. And I also want each track tag to be tagged with the artwork from its source and have all the volume levels leveled out so that there isn't variation between songs from different source albums. But the crux of the matter is that level of customization going to be worth all the time and energy it will take to complete? It's not like it's just 10 to 12 songs, we're talking thousands of songs. I want to say yes, because in the end, I can see a lot of value to it, but for all those one off songs by artists I couldn't care less about beyond the one or two songs I do like by them, sometimes finding the information requires a lot of additional research since some liner notes for albums are severely lacking in information, while few are as complete as I would like them to be. A good example is a Dolly Parton multi-disc compilation CD I bought in Australia. The liner notes did not indicate when the songs were released and in order to be able to have them appear on my iPods automated playlists that sort songs by year, I had to research when each song was released. Many of the songs were from the 1960s and 1970s so I certainly did not want to go with the late 1990's release date of the collection. And by the same token, what do you do with songs that were recorded ages ago but only surface on box sets or albums as bonus tracks released years later? Do you label something like ABBA's "Put On Your White Sombrero" as 1994 for when it was released on the Thank You For The Music box set or give it 1980 since it was originally supposed to be on the "Super Trouper" album? The problem is there is no black or white answer, it's all shades of grey, and ultimately I need to pick which shade will make me happiest, since it's my project. It would just be so much easier if someone else could just do it for me. But I don't want to pay anyone to do it, and I know my standards are ones that only I would be happy with, so the only one who could do the work to my satisfaction is me. So while that's my ultimate goal, I'm considering it more like an impossible dream at this point because I don't want my iPod to be a ball and chain that ties me to my computer. It's supposed to a tool to provide me more freedom to enjoy my music away from my computer. Let's face it, given the choice, I'd rather carry around an iPod than a portable CD player and hundreds of CDs just to get the same amount of available songs to play on something like a walk or even a flight across the country. Hell, even on a road trip, such as the one from Detroit to San Diego I took in June, it was so much nicer to just use an iPod, a car charger, and an FM transmitter than cases and cases of CDs to flip through. Despite being frustrated that I can't fully take advantage of all the features of my iPod because the songs don't have all the tagged information I want on them, I'm still overall quite pleased with having taken the step into the iPod generation. I already know I'm hooked because I've already reached the point where if I buy a CD in the store, I'll wait to get home and upload it to my iPod to listen to it, even though there is a CD player in the car. Ryan Cameron |
