My Audio Life
It all started with my brother’s return from his Viet Nam experience in 1969 with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Along with the reel-to-reel recorder, the setup included an amp and a couple big-bass floor-speakers. We spent time recording our (mostly his) vinyl collection, recording songs from the radio, and listening to music. Loud music, mostly surf music, such as The Ventures and other guitars-and-drums groups of the 1960s.
I bought my own setup within the year which included a Pioneer amp, a Garrard turntable, a Sony cassette player that auto-reversed (cool stuff in those days), and two big Pioneer speakers that are, almost 40 years later, still mounted up high on my walls.
Music has remained a part of my life ever since, through all the various moves and upgrades. Components have come and gone, and the current component setup uses those same big Pioneer speakers, plus a couple great sounding book shelf speakers at the other end of the room, and a AIWA combination CD/cassette player, together with what was literally hundreds of CDs and vinyl albums. That was until I purchased my first iPod in late 2005, which forced me to rethink of my audio life, with my computer becoming the focal point.
I soon began loading the vinyl albums and CDs into iTunes, and scanning my own album art. Within a short period I filled the 30GB iPod. A concurrent review of the vinyl and CD collection revealed several that were not really keepers, and several that were one-trick ponies with a single song being the reason for the original purchase. While keeping a realistic collection of vinyl and CDs, a local used-CD store bought the rest at a fair price, and I walked out with enough cash to buy a new 80GB iPod, which as I write this, is still only half filled with over 6000 songs.
Until it died, the iMac had been kept just for the tunes, connected to a set of Bose Companion 5 speakers. The combination of iTunes and the Bose speakers, along with the iMac (now replaced by the Dell PC) is essentially a great stereo, with edit capability, with more music readily available from several on-line sources including iTunes, Amazon, Jamendo, Last.fm, or whatever else strikes my fancy.
I can still crank up the volume and feel the music. The sound is so great that I haven’t had my four-speaker component stereo even powered-on for over a year. And I can pick and choose the songs I want on iTunes, by artist, by album, by date added, by least played, by title, or completely random.
I use iTunes, but to be fair, a couple days ago I tried Zune, having noticed the recommendation given it by the newest Maximum PC magazine. It took Zune well over two hours to import the 6500 songs in the music collection, and after trying to use it to play particular songs, I think I’ll stay with iTunes. I don’t much care for Zune’s look and feel. I have also tried using Windows Media Player, and MediaMonkey (which I like a lot).
The recent iTunes 8 for Windows update is giving me pause about continued use of Apple’s product, and replacing it with MediaMonkey. I only need to figure out how to keep using my iPod as the portable player. With the silliness of Windows Media Player’s whole “folder.jpg” and “AlbumSmallArt.jpg” thing, versus embedding the album art as part of the MP3 files, I know that I’m staying as far away from Windows Media Player as possible.
