I’ve got an iPod shuffle. It weighs 22g; about as much as a reasonably fat nightingale.
Tag: iTunes
I’ve only just started getting into music blogs, but they’re fabulous. Of the ones I visit at the moment, the ones which I’ve taken most music from are PopText and Funky16Corners, but I’m currently listening to a 70 minute mix of ‘dancehall/bashment, reggaeton, R’n’B/hip hop/crunk, soca, reggae and ragga jungle’ from Heatwave which I learned about via Mudd Up!. And my award for best design goes to Cocaine Blunts and Hip-Hop Tapes, though it would be even better without frames, imho.
And in answer to the obvious question – yes, I’ve already been persuaded to buy music (with actual money) which I wouldn’t have otherwise, so I’m not completely being a parasite.
[EDIT: having done some internet research, I now actually know what reggaeton is: Puerto Rican reggae-influenced hip hop – the booty-shaking face of globalisation, basically. ‘Bashment’ is still a mystery. Sounds good, though; I’d recommend that mix I mentioned and I’m now listening to a reggaeton mix from the same people.]
I’m sure this is old news to a lot of you, but humour me.
I’m amazed by how much it has changed my listening experience, having all my music on the computer. I didn’t actually intend to put all my music on the hard disk when I got the computer – the CD player is within easy reach of my desk anyway, and I don’t have an mp3 player – but I tried it out mainly because I wanted to play with the software on my new machine. What makes the difference isn’t the way that all your music is at your fingertips, although that’s nice. It’s that I have a whole load of albums which I like, but don’t particularly want to listen to all of at once. The simple fact that the computer mixes up tracks from different albums breathes life into your collection, just because you don’t have to take the decision to listen to a whole hour of acid house, or Breton folk, or early blues, or whatever it might be.
I thought that if was going to make a lot of use of the playlist function it would be making playlists like ‘funky stuff’ or ‘easy-cheesy’ or ‘Americana’: specific selections to suit my mood. In fact my main playlist completely ignores genre and mood; it consists of a combination of:
high-rated songs that haven’t been played for four days
unrated songs that haven’t been played for two weeks
current favourites
Oddly enough, the fact that the playlist might go ‘Charles Aznavour – The Prodigy – Bob Marley’ isn’t as much of a problem as I would have expected. I thought that switching between wildly different kinds of music would just be annoying – but actually I quite like the variety.