My coworker’s father in law is going in for some surgery soon. He’s a huge classical music fan, so his family is getting him an iPod for christmas. That way he can take a massive library of tunes in and listen to them while recovering.
The iPod rocks… I’ve had one of my own for a while. I’ve got one of the original 5GB models. I credit it with saving my sanity on long car trips… I’ve also discovered that it really makes you pay attention to your own musical tastes.
With the new 10 or 20GB models, you can haul around a good two weeks worth of tunes. With the 5GB one, you’ve got to pick and choose. After all, you’re only going to be carrying around the equivalent of 100 CDs, so you better make sure you’ve got the ones you want to hear…
A couple of weeks ago, my fiancee and I were house sitting for her mom. It bumped our morning and evening commute time up a bit, so I put the Harry Potter Audiobooks into the mix… Now that we’ve finished with those, I’ve got to decide how to use the gig or so of storage space before we drive north for the holidays.
My musical tastes are ecclectic, to say the least. I was a free-form disc jockey at WCBN for a while, and it was kind of a requirement… I remember one show where I spent two hours demonstrating the similarities between Reggae, Klezmer and traditional Finnish folk music.*
So I’ve started going through my library, converting things and loading them up. The ‘Genre’ list looks fairly diverse and I’ve still got room for two or three CDs, so I can add any special requests. I was a bit surprised to see how many of the songs I chose were from the 80’s. I wonder if musical tastes crystalize in high-school…
If so, I don’t see much hope for commercal radio to stop sucking anytime in the next few years.
* If you’re really interested, it has to do with close harmony singing, the use of horns or reeds as a chorus, similarities in rhythmic structure and the preference for minor keys.