My Tech Life: Music, Mac and Windows
iTunes lets me focus on finding songs, not the process
The first time I ever bought a record, I used my paper route money to purchase 2 45s: the Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” and Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Listen to What the Man Says.”
Within the week, I’d bought two LPs as well: Wings’ “Band on the Run” and “Venus & Mars.”
That first year, I would borrow my dad’s stereo system to listen to my music, putting on the Koss headphones.
The music collection stayed relatively small until my parents let me move out of the bedroom I shared with my kid brother and set up in a corner of our basement, hanging curtains to provide a semblance of privacy from the laundry corner and my dad’s workshop (where he was building a computer from a kit he’d ordered from a magazine — this will make sense later).
Now that I could, if I wanted, listen to my own music through speakers without disturbing anyone else in the house (as the bedrooms were all two floors above the basement), I decided I wanted a stereo.
Most of my friends had purchased all-in-one units, with a record player built into the stereo receiver and amplifier, sometimes with a cassette deck for making mixtapes off your records (or off the radio). But my dad suggested I get separate stereo components — turntable, receiver, tape deck, speakers — as I could upgrade piecemeal in the years to come.
I think he suspected I was into this music thing pretty seriously.
He went with me over to Rex Radio and Television. It was your typical 1970s stereo shop — loud ads on both local TV stations and the rock radio outlets, even louder ads in the newspaper every week. You know, “Low Low Prices!!”
They’d have probably ripped me off something fierce if my dad — who, after all, had a custom system built into a wall of our family room — hadn’t been there with me. After all, he still has his pride and joy, the Jensen floor speakers he’d gotten in college.
Dad steered me to the Pioneer receivers — I’m pretty sure he’d done all the research into what was the best gear for the money ahead of our trip. I chose a Pioneer SX-450 — the entry level into Pioneer’s home receivers. I got a BSR turntable for my records, and some small bookshelf speakers — which my dad also still has, in the living room. I later traded him those for a pair of homemade bookshelf speakers he’d built before he could afford the Jensens, and put them in the back of my ’67 Mustang fastback. (When the car was stolen and stripped, the speakers disappeared with the Cragar mag wheels.)
When I got home and set that all up in the basement, I was in heaven.
A few years later, my dad began looking for another job. In preparation for selling the house, he pulled that stereo out of the family room wall, and patched the drywall. While the idea of moving away from my friends was heartwrenching, the fact that he gifted me his Ampex 350 two-track reel to reel tape deck — which he’d picked up second hand from a radio station — softened the blow.
I spent that last year in my basement quarter busily making mix tapes of my favorite songs. It was about what you’d expect from a 17-year-old white kid in Ohio in the 1970s: heavy on Steve Miller, the Doobie Brothers, Jackson Browne, the Eagles, with a little Commodores and Earth Wind & Fire thrown in.
When we left Ohio for San Diego, I had more than 100 LPs — a larger collection than my dad’s — and about 20 45s, plus assorted cassettes and open reel tapes.
It was a bigger collection than most of my friends’, but manageable in that I could instantly find any record I wanted. They were sorted alphabetically by artist — not too hard to find stuff.
But when I got on staff at the San Diego State student newspaper, and found out you could get free LPs just for writing a review of them, my music habit turned serious. The fact that we had two Tower Records in town, plus independent record stores like Blue Meanie and Off the Record — well, I probably was buying two LPs for every free one I got from the paper.
By the time I graduated college, I’m sure I had more than 1,000 LPs. They were stacked against the wall in three large rows, and finding a specific record was getting more difficult. When I got a job at the Chula Vista Star-News, and they were disposing of an old wooden shelf used to hold back copies of the paper, I somehow got that home to my apartment in Ocean Beach. It held probably 1,500 LPs. I still have it, too.
But soon it was overflowing, and additional shelves were purchased.
When my grandmother passed, I inherited her significant collection of 45s, and then my dad gifted me all his old reel to reel tapes.
The newspapers and magazines I was writing for in the early 1990s were getting all their review copies of new releases on CD by then, and so now I had CD towers scattered around my apartment, along with all the LPs and reel to reel tapes.
And it was becoming extremely difficult to find a specific album or song — particularly as the labels began churning out all kinds of compilation box sets on CD about that time. So if I was interviewing an older blues musician, and wanted to listen to his music ahead of our chat, finding his or her songs was turning out to be almost impossible.
I was drowning in a sea of music.
Ever since my dad had built that KIM-I kit computer in our basement, and then hooked it up to a keyboard and a TV, I’d been messing around with personal computers. I’d picked up an Atari 800 in college to do my word processing on, and then an Atari ST 16-bit computer in the late ’80s.
I was switched over to Windows by the mid-’90s, and realized I had to somehow organize my music collection in order to make it accessible.
I started off by creating a spreadsheet, in “Quattro Pro”, but then realized that given the size of my music collection — well over 5,000 LPs, plus half that in CDs (and growing) — a database was the way to go.
So I taught myself the rudiments of building a database so that I could enter every song on every album, and note where it was located in my apartment.
By then, I’d begun organizing my music by broad genres: rock, classical, jazz, blues, country, comedy. From there, each section was arranged alphabetically by artist.
So even with all that music, I could find a specific LP or CD if I knew what I was looking for.
And remembered that I even had it.
With that many records, more than once I bought an album only to get home and find out I already owned it.
The database project was progressing fairly well when I bought the two oldest kids an iMac in the spring of 2001. Now, I was mostly excited because Apple was having a promotion where you got a free ink jet printer with the purchase of any iMac.
But it also came with a new bit of software called “iTunes” for organizing MP3 files, whatever those were. And it came with a little MP3 player that you could connect to the Mac with a cable and load music onto it. (It wasn’t an iPod — it was powered by a single AAA battery, and only held about 12 songs.)
iTunes came with two demo songs — “Fishin’ Jim” by The Gay (a bouncy little bit of indie-flavored power pop) and “Cro-Mag Rally Theme,” a song from a video game sountrack. (I still have both of those in my iTunes library, too.)
It took me a few months of ripping CDs to the iMac to realize that I could, in fact, find any song on the iMac instantly — and play it just as instantly!
But I could only listen via my headphones then, and not through the vastly more satisfying stereo.
It was only when Apple ported iTunes to the Windows platform that everything came into place to allow me to fully organize my music library as a sort of working, integrated database.
As the price of hard drives began plummeting about a decade ago, I began ripping my rock and blues CDs at 320kbps and the classical and jazz as uncompressed AIFF files.
Then I picked up a Mac Mini, and hooked it up to the stereo system — in fact, my dad’s old Sony receiver that had been in our wall in the family room when I was growing up. (I had the pots cleaned, and the things sounds as good as ever.)
I’ve spent the last decade ripping all my CDs to the hard drive — which is backed up every month or so to three different external drives, two of which are kept off site for security against fire or theft.
And now I’m in the midst of ripping all my LP compilations — box sets and soundtracks — to the hard drive via a second turntable hooked up to my soundcard. I’ve also ripped select reel to reels (via a smaller Tandberg deck my brother-in-law gave me) and some local releases off cassette, plus most of my 45s.
I’m at 190,000 songs on iTunes — and the fastest growth isn’t from the LPs and tapes I’m ripping, but the fact that the record labels that hope I’ll write a review now send a digital download, which I can flow directly into iTunes.
While my music collection is far more vast than ever, when I interview a musician today I can instantly look to see what I have of theirs, and listen to it in preparation for our chat.
And if I still have their earlier releases on LP and haven’t ripped them yet, well, there’s my motivation.
I know there are those who feel that digital music lacks the warmth or vibrancy or clarity of vinyl, and the reel to reel fans will point out that reel tapes have the same sonic range as LPs and can be played dozens of times with no loss of fidelity, unlike LPs which degrade every time you play them.
But for me, listening to music is primarily an emotional experience, not physical.
And besides, after spending most of my late teens and all of my 20s riding motorcycles, shooting guns and going to heavy metal concerts, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t pass even the most basic blind listening test.
While I look back with great fondness on the rituals we engaged in to listen to music back in the day — whether it was carefully cleaning a record before playing it, or winding the leader of a tape through the spindles and spools to get it onto the blank pickup reel — booting up the computer, quickly finding one of my many iTunes playlists, and then jumping into the music is far more rewarding than the old methods ever were.
And that was assuming I could find the record I was looking for in the first place.
-30-
For some, probably perverse, reason, iTunes hasn't entered the MP3 download market.
This leaves me, as best I've able to determine from an increasingly dysfunctional Internet, with a dysfunctional Amazon as a sole source of MP3 that are older than half my senior age.