MP3 Chronicles

I finally bought my first MP3 player. For years, I stuck to the ancient technology, buying fragile discmans after fragile discmans, clinging to my 700 CD's, occasionally burning a mix to shake things up. Moving to Australia has made such a system pointless. Originally, I was going to buy a couple 200 disc folders and lug a select half of my collection in my suitcase. I quickly abandoned this idea and instead bought a 150 GB harddrive instead. This is going to sound terrible, but I feared this would not be enough. It probably would have gone the distance and held nearly all of cd's as well as most of my MP3 collection (which is a whole other land of ridiculous as well). In the end, I was a bit conservative and only brought 2.5 months of continuous, non-overlapping music. What a shame!

I still however was not willing to purchase an iPod. I'm a purist when it comes to music. With the exception of those artists who only put out good singles, I like to keep the albums intact. Music and especially albums are going downhill though. It started with the invention of the CD. Once the CD came out, it gave musicians the unneeded freedom of making 60+ minute albums. With LP's, 45 minutes was all you got, so space was not wasted; bad songs were canned. Once CD's came around, bands started throwing in whatever song was catchy enough to make it to a demo, not matter if it was good or not. Albums as an art suffered. Seriously, I dare you to name a great 60+ minute album from the last 20 years (Blood Sugar Sex Magic excluded), or at least one that would not become better from some editing.

The iPod (or iTunes) took this one step further. Now, you don't even need to make an album anymore. All you need is one lackluster song, then you are destined to be heard as a cellphone ring in the back of the bus for at least one week. Now "artists" don't even have to be good to make it and nobody cares about making more than three ok songs anymore. Plus, now that the kids can just download Stairway to Heaven (they won't though, because it is not on Guitar Hero), they will never even learn that is is only the fourth best song on Led Zeppelin's untitle 4th album. Wow, that was a bit of a digression from the original topic!

Given my future travels alone, I figured I'd need some music. I will never buy an iPod...never. So, I spent days doing research, picking just the right one. I narrowed it down to something by Creative. I wanted a 30+GB player, but they only had a five year old refurbished one I could afford. In the end, I purchased the Zen Mosaic 16GB. Now before we continue, look back to the earlier paragraphs. Considering that 150GB was a compromise for me, imagine what only 16GB would do to me. That is only 1/10 of my music collection!

It came in on Monday. Well, here is where it gets annoying. My external harddrive spontaneously stopped working on the home computer a month ago. It still works on other computers though. Tuesday, I set up an afternoon to borrow the neighbor's computer to do my transfers. Didn't work on his computer either. Sucky.

Turns out, ti doesn't wokr on any PC's, but on Mac's, there are no problems (dad, wipe that dopey smug grin off your face right now!) So, I called Stefen, local reporter for the paper, all around good bloke, probable Mac user since he's a newspaper man. I was right on this. (coincidentally, he doesn't use a mac at work).

So, Wednesday at lunch, I rocked up to his house on the opposite end of Broken Hill, plugged in the harddrive and succeess! So, I plugged in the MP3 player to the the other USB and nothing. I went to install the drivers, but the damned mac wouldn't run the mini-CD ( why are these even made?) My best solution was to buy a flashdrive, transfer the music a little bit at a time to the flashdrive, take it home, put that music on the MP3 player, then repeat until I've filled the 16GB. 20 minutes adn $40 later, I get back to Stefans to begin this assenine process.

One hour and two computer crashes later, I'm stuck with only A Tribe Called Quest's discography and Wire's first album. I need to leave because Stefan is to start work. At least I had two completely different styles of music.

Sharon was able to help me though. At four, a mac at her work was open for my use. I was ready to leave at 3:30, b ut Jonathan was borrowing his bike from me. Jess lent me her car so I could hunt him down, finally catching the bike two blocks from Sharon's work. Sadly, I did not have my things with me.

So, Jess gave me a ride with the bike back to Sharon's work, saving the time and potential death from riding a bike two miles up and down hills into the wind in 100 degree heat. At 4:30, I started frantically transfering files, the only obstacle was my shift at work coming in a hour. In the end, I only ended up with 7GB of my original 150 for my trip. That's only five days of coninuous non-overlapping music. My life is a tragedy.