CDs: in memoriam
November 8th, 2009 Posted in music, technology
There are a few things I miss about CDs.
They started up straight away. Just push play. It was just one mechanical action between you and the music, nothing to boot up and double-click on. It was much less of a physical divide when there is only a split second action required between you thinking “I want to hear this music”, and that music actually starting. With MP3s it’s a much more elaborate protocol of clicks, responses, re-clicks and confirmations. Before you could just get it on with the music, now you have to take it out to a movie and dinner first.
Of course, you now inevitably have a much larger library of music at your mousetips, but you have to go through the booting up ritual even just to see that selection of songs. If, after browsing by mouse through the acres of uncovered albums you decide that in fact nothing suits your mood right now and you’ll listen to chattering rain on the windows instead, it’s too late. You’ve already committed yourself to booting up the computer. There’s this extra task “starting up the computer” which has incised itself into the middle of the music, it’s now a three part process.
But it’s not like that’s a majorly taxing physical task. In terms of purely calorific value, pressing your Dell’s power-on button is worth about negative one-quarter of one M&M. But that’s not the point. It’s the time taken, the wait for the music library to appear on the screen, the worry that the battery might run out before the peasant’s in Beethoven’s 6th get back to their partying. Every little disconnect adds up.
What I want is a hefty leatherbound catalog of my music. Every beefsteak-thick page has the album art, liner notes and track list on it. If I touch the page with my palm my computer instantly starts to play the selected piece. Of course, the major problem would be how the hell to add extra pages to the thing. It’s totally cheating if this all done on a single electronic screen like an iPod. I want physical, tactile interactions. I want to flip pages. I want to be able to measure the size of the library by the heft of the book in my hands — and until we can electronically create mass, which is never — that’s not gonna happen.
I strongly feel that people want music to retain some physicalness, but in an age of MP3s I’m not sure how we do that.
For now, I’ll click folders, and be thankful for the gigabytes of music. I don’t miss CDs enough to retreat back to them.
November 8th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
“Before you could just get it on with the music, now you have to take it out to a movie and dinner first.”
That’s about the funniest thing I’ve heard lately. Thanks for the chuckle.
I, too, like my iPod but sometimes wish for the convenience of a CD. Although I have a good portion of my library on my hard drive, I won’t be getting rid of those CDs any time soon.
November 8th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Well, I think this sort of sentiment is basically a function of age.
I started listening to music on my mother’s 78s. If you don’t know what “78s” were, you can probably look it up on Wikipedia. Comparing what either hard-disk-stored music or CDs sound like, and the convenience of using them, to that experience is a difference greater than night and day. So today’s audio experience doesn’t bother me at all.
Besides, my computer is already on most of the day every day, and I usually leave it on over night. So what’s this “boot up” problem? If it’s not on, or I’m away from it, I probably have my iPod with me, and I can just stick the ear phones on and mash the little wheel to hear anything I want (out of a library so huge I couldn’t have dreamed of carrying it around on my back in the days of LPs, or even with CDs). It’s the next thing to heaven, as far as I’m concerned. (And since I don’t believe heaven is real, that’s no problem either.)
November 9th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
I’m never comfortable leaving my computer on at home due to a combination of worry about electrical hazards and energy savings. Which is pretty ridiculous considering that I have absolutely tonnes of electronics I happily leave on in my lab. It’s probably more about force of habit.
More practically we don’t have a PC in the living room. If we did I probably would leave it on as a dedicated media server. At the moment I have to lug my laptop over to the speakers, make sure the power cord is in, unplug the speakers from the TV, etc, etc. It’s definitely too elaborate to do casually.
Oh yeah, and we totally had some 78s… no wait, we didn’t we had 33.3 and 45 rpm records when I was kid. I remember being fascinated by the sleeve art and “Nipper” the HMV dog. Those sleeves were sexy. That’s the sort of format I’d like for browsing through my music collection.
TD: Thanks for that. I too have all my old CDs lying around (well, actually sorted semi-neatly into binders. How anal.) but at some point in the last year or two I completely stopped using them. There’s no way they’re leaving the house yet though. It still feels a bit perverse buying stuff purely electronically, even if it all ends up the same way.