I am not musically gifted - I wish I were! - and my musical taste is apparently questionable. Or at least many people have told me that I have no discernment. I shrug such comments off. Musical taste is a very personal thing, and I feel that my preferences are as valid as anyone else's. In any case, my aim has mostly been to put together the 'soundtrack of my life', which necessarily includes some things that might make many a proper music buff shudder or cringe. But then, it's my life and my soundtrack, and not theirs.
And besides, there's an important medical aspect. I rather fancy that, if and when I begin to get senile, playing those tracks of mine will jerk me back into full recollection, and revive sweet or exciting memories. Seriously.
I am at least open to new musical experiences, and do occasionally admit some strange stuff into my collection. A friend will play something, or I hear it when shopping; I find out what it is and add it.
Ah, my collection. It's only a small one: 1,851 tracks, all in mp3 format, bought and downloaded and free of playing restrictions, so that I can transfer them easily from one device to another. As they are stored on physical media (primarily the microSD card in my phone) and not streamed, I avoid paying subscriptions to have access. I will always be able to hear my music anytime, anywhere - and forever, so long as I have a charged-up device.
About a third of those 1,851 tracks were ripped long ago from pop CDs. This was when I had a desktop PC - or a laptop - that could play them. My current laptop, bought in 2016, can't play CDs - and therefore can't copy them. So from 2016 it's been impossible for me to rip music tracks from a CD. But this hasn't been a major concern, because I'd already ripped whatever I needed well before 2016. Indeed, once I'd copied the tracks I wanted, the actual CDs were redundant. I binned them all some time ago, as part of a decluttering exercise.
The remaining two-thirds of my music collection has mostly been bought online, then downloaded - one at a time, or in small batches - from Amazon. This has been going on for years, but has gradually got more difficult. As chronicled in several posts in recent years, Amazon has long wanted its customers to sign up to one of its subscription packages, and has by degrees made it harder to make small one-off music track purchases.
More lately an ongoing tussle with Google has made Amazon stop customers buying mp3 tracks using an app on their Android phone. Two giants slugging it out, with the customer as the loser. The current workaround is to use a browser on one's phone or laptop and buy mp3 tracks from Amazon's website - then download them. This done, they can be copied elsewhere. The process - the precise sequence of steps to take - isn't intuitive, but it works.
Anyway, I have a collection amounting to 1,851 tracks. It includes almost all the music that ever meant anything to me. There must still be tracks from, say, the 1960s or 1970s - or later - that ought to be added, but I'm scratching my head to think of any. I've already got down to the dregs, so to speak.
So the vast collections of music offered by this or that subscription service have no attraction for me. Nearly all that music would be irrelevant to my personal life-experiences or associations. I dare say that there is much I've never heard that I might find appealing, if I ever explored such a monumental archive. If, that is, I were music-curious and were willing to throw an extraordinary amount of time at it! But I'm not music-curious, and don't have oodles of time, and I'm unwilling to pay an ongoing monthly fee for something I might never get round to doing.
It strikes me anyway that you can have too much music. I listen to my own small collection every day, a few tracks at a time, and it takes me 190-odd days (that is, over six months) to hear all 1,851 tracks, playing them in alphabetical song-title order. If I had 3,500 tracks, it might therefore take me a year to hear them all just once. What then would be the point of a collection of 10,000 tracks, so that I'd get to hear each one only once every three years?
So I think it must be a waste of money to pay for streamed access to millions of tracks. It would take too many lifetimes to get even reasonable value from the ongoing outlay. How could anyone trawl through even a small fraction of the music available? Surely, just as there is an upper limit on the number of close friends you can pay proper attention to, so there is only so much time and appreciation and proper attention you can give to music.
I suppose - not being a passionate music lover - I am missing the point. What I can say is that any search for music on Amazon seems to throw up a lot of dross. It would be galling to discover that this is general for most of the many millions of tracks in Amazon's music archive. I don't want to waste my life - and money - dipping endlessly into the boring or second-rate.
Need I say it? Not one of my 1,851 tracks is boring or second-rate to me. And if you were me, you'd agree.
The earlier days of digital music, especially walking about with a large collection of favourites on an iPod, was much simpler and intuitive. Out of interest I have tried several trials of streaming services and even free seemed too much for the inconvenience and horrible interfaces available to find anything especially if not made this century.
ReplyDeleteI am happy to have random. music playing when washing dishes but still prefer to put on a physical disc on a decent player though having recently turned my old LPs into a heap of cash I am now mostly limited to shelfs of CDs. I shall be more than happy if I never get another, there are more than enough already.
Just to say you can buy an external DVD/CD player for under £20 to attach to a laptop or tablet device which should allow you to rip from CD's/ play CD's or DVD's. Speaking personally I have had too many people present with failed external hard drives crying real salt tears to be entirely comfortable with getting rid of my CD collection just yet. Ripping to FLAC will keep sound quality high.
ReplyDeleteIt's clearly a problem, finding, buying, and then safely storing 'old music'. I do of course have multiple copies of my purchased or ripped mp3s, on phone, laptop, two SSDs, and even on some old external hard drives.
ReplyDeleteAs time passes, so it seems to become harder to browse for tracks one hasn't yet got, especially obscure songs that were never big hits and won't end up on compilation albums. That's where retaining the original CD (or vinyl single/album) really matters - provided one still has the means to play them, or digitise the music afresh. How much old recordings and equipment can one keep?
Lucy
For what its worth if you are comfortable with a possible infringement of copyright and lower sound quality AND if you can find the desired track, audiobook or Radio 4 play then you stand a good chance of taking a copy and store the file on your hard drive with a range of freeware software. Surprisingly rare material is put out there. For example I never expected to be able to hear Appleby's End by Michael Innes a radio 4 play broadcast only once in 1982 again but found it on the Internet. An example of such software is here https://www.any-video-converter.com/products-freeware/
DeleteI've used ClipGrab successfully for a long time to extract just the music from music videos and film clips on YouTube. Many of these are of 'perfectly good enough' quality.
ReplyDeleteLucy
I'll stand up and be the odd one out among those commenting. I ditched my modest collection of CDs in 2019 and subscribed to Google Play Music, later changing to Apple Music. I can't justify the £9 per month in purely monetary terms (£108 per year buys a lot of CDs!) but I like the convenience, have amassed three fairly large playlists (pop, folk and religious), have added to my library a large collection of Rock and Folk albums and endeavoured to widen my taste in classical music.
ReplyDeleteApple are almost unique in offering a purely music subscription. Amazon offer a reduced price if one subscribes to Prime, and Google have combined theirs with a YouTube video subscription for £12 per month. The latter is tempting as there's some good stuff on YouTube these days. For now, though, I'll stay with Apple.
Angie