I’ve just bought myself a new toy, a CD walkman that plays CDR discs with MP3 files on them. It’s a top of the line (although soon to be outdated, I’m sure) model by Philips, the ‘expanium 103‘. I wanted to get a good one, and at the very least, one that read the ID3 tags (so that the name and artist can be seen in the little LCD screen). It seemed to be between this and the ‘Riovolt 250‘. I chose the Philips, probably because it looked nicer. I am shallow. Plus I rarely listen to the radio, so wanted to avoid the added distraction of having one built in.
Earlier this evening I hooked my new toy up to my old Aquatron ‘egg’ 8-track player with built in speakers. It was funny to mix the new and old technologies.
I spent most of the evening making just one full (700MB) ‘mp3 CD’. I started off by including a Super Furry Animals ‘best of’ set of mp3s I had done for a recent compilation. I thought I would do the same for a few other contemporary bands, but in the end, it seemed like too much hassle. So I did the easiest thing – I plugged in 4 Belle & Sebastian albums, five Hefner albums and three Pulp albums, and let Music Match and the CDDB encode the mp3 files for me. The Philips machine will treat each folder as an ‘album’, so it wasn’t too hard to set things up nicely.
However, the M3U tags on my existing mp3 collection left a lot to be desired. I downloaded a program, ‘tagclinic’, to help with this, but I think however you do it, making them perfect is a big job.
I’m currently listening, rather emotionally, to a quickly-put-together ‘nostalgia’ compilation of tracks I was into at age 16-18. I’m a complete music fanatic now, and I was then too, but in a different, almost more obsessive way. While my taste now is much wider, this spreads me more thinly around, and I don’t listen to records as obsessively often as I did before.
Here’s my ‘nostalgia’ collection (I should really go and recommend all of these):
- Stereolab – Peng 33
- Chapterhouse – Mesmerise
- Fieldmice – Indian Ocean
- McCarthy – Red Sleeping Beauty
- Pale Saints – Half Life remembered
- Popguns – Someone you love
- Ride – Vapor Trail
- Smiths – Last Night I dreamt that somebody loved me
- Sundays – Goodbye
- Wedding Present – Give my love to Kevin
Anyway, the thought that I could potentially put my entire music collection onto a number of CDs that I could carry is kind of amazing. I guess within a few years, compression will have improved to the extent that thousands of songs will fit on one disc.
A self-indulgent post, sorry.