Over the years, I’ve spent way too much time collecting, organizing, archiving, and updating my music collection. As documented copiously on these pages, I’ve moved it from machine to machine, horse-traded MP3’s with friends, ripped CDs from various different sources, and yes, bought a lot of music. I recently brought my backup drive into work and imported the whole thing onto the cavernous hard drive of my work tower, and it’s great to have here.

However, I haven’t listened to any of it since I moved it.

I tend to obsess over songs when they get stuck in my head, and while I have several playlists of old favorites in iTunes, I’ve grown tired of a lot of them after repeat plays. These days, I’m using Spotify to play my current favorites over and over again (current earworm: Days are Gone, by Haim) and foregoing the iTunes collection.

It could be that my current work mode is more segmented; at the previous gig I would have uninterrupted (well, usually) blocks of several hours to work, and a playlist or podcast fit that bill nicely. Now I’m splitting the days up in half-hours, which means I can listen to songs but rarely do I get a full podcast in, which is like watching 15 minutes of your favorite movie every day.

I still believe in owning a copy of the thing that I buy–having the actual CD or MP3 files with no DRM, for example–but it’s nice to be able to search for and play a new song immediately through a streaming service.

I think the other big issue is that I don’t have the main library on my laptop drive. It’s so much easier to make and edit playlists on a primary computer; I rarely get down to the basement to edit things on the server, and for some reason iTunes is puking on all of the songs in its library and refuses to stream them to the AppleTV.

 

Date posted: December 18, 2013 | Filed under music | Leave a Comment »

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