Music Was Lightweight
Poddy Training: Part 6 of the physical music to digital music yellow brick road
As much as I loved collecting compact discs, the collection was growing out of control and even though I switched from jewel cases to plastic sleeves, something still had to be done. There was a lot of activity around digital audio musical files happening around the late 90s and especially the early 2000s, but it took me until the mid to late 2000s to switch completely away from CDs. I never checked out Napster. I heard a lot about Pandora but didn’t get into it. I rarely bought anything from iTunes, though I did use iTunes for Windows to house the rips of my CDs and build my MP3 file library, including tracks purchased from other sources. And of course I used iTunes to transfer my files to my iPod.
Ah… the iPod. The first Apple product I ever bought. My first iPod was purchased in July 2003, even though the first iPod was introduced in late 2001. My first one was a 30GB third generation “classic” iPod that I paid $500 for. Wow, looking back at my notes, I didn’t realize they were that expensive at the time. I’m not even sure why I bought it. Could be because it was the new hotness and I wanted something other than my computer to play my library on. Plus, this was probably around the time I started exercising seriously and I wanted to be able to listen to music while running and at the gym. Those early iPods were not great for that. They had hard drives in them which tended to skip when a lot of movement was involved. They did have some “skip protection”, which I think was basically just buffering, but I don’t think it worked all that well. This issue was not really solved satisfactorily until the release of the iPod Nano with flash memory.
Even though those early iPods seemed pretty heavy, they were a revelation in portability. Note this was before smartphones, so there weren’t a lot of choices for listening to music when you were out and about. There were AM/FM radios of course, and probably even headphones with built-in radios, but there wasn’t much for listening to your own library. There were portable cassette players and CD players, which were larger and heavier and were not real useful for running. There were other digital audio players around before the iPod, but the iPod really perfected the user interface and the ease of transferring files (especially if you had a Mac, but not too shabby with a PC either).
I loved being able to populate a “jogging playlist” of random fast & short songs from my library. I had a program that analyzed tracks and set the BPM, which was not entirely accurate, but worked well enough. I would even keep notes about what songs I listened to on a run. I loved the “last played date” metric in iTunes. I credit the iPod with encouraging me to get fit, because exercise was no longer boring.
It took awhile for car manufacturers to put iPod interfaces inside autos so you could play your music on the car stereo through the iPod. My initial solution for listening to my digital audio library in the car was to burn my MP3s to CD-RW discs and play them in the car CD player. That worked surprisingly well, as some auto CD players at the time could handle digital audio files on CDs and could even display track information and such. But it was a pain maintaining that disc library and having to constantly burn discs as my music library expanded.
In 2007, I bought a car iPod integration unit that was manufactured by Dice Electronics. It plugged into the CD changer interface connection at the back of the car stereo unit, so I actually had to take apart my dashboard a bit to get it back there. The iPod connector cable (complete with 30-pin dock connector) snaked through to the glove compartment, so I could keep the iPod out of sight. This was kind of a wonky solution, and the user interface wasn’t perfect as it tried to map the iPod controls and display to the CD changer interface. But it was fantastic to be able to listen to such a large selection from my music library on demand in my car like that. And to refresh it, all I had to do was disconnect the iPod and hook it up to the computer.
By this time, my original iPod was showing its age. It would frequently just crash. And I had to replace the battery more than once, which was not an easy operation since the batteries in those units were not really meant to be replaceable, especially by the user. I had to buy aftermarket battery replacement kits. Prying apart the case was no fun and it was easy to cause some surface damage to the poor thing. I was able to do it though. Also around this time, the iPod Nano came out, and it no longer had the huge 30-pin dock. That would’ve been nice for me, except that the car adaptor had the 30-pin connector. So I actually ended up buying a reconditioned 40GB 4th generation classic iPod from eBay for $139 and used that in the car. It served me well until the switch to iPhones and Bluetooth and all. When I traded in that car in 2015, it still had the adaptor unit hooked up, since it was too much trouble to try to remove it. I always wondered what the subsequent owners thought of that ancient iPod connector in the glove compartment.
Shortly after I bought the reconditioned Classic iPod for the car in 2007, I also bought an iPod Nano. It was a blue/green 3rd generation one with 8GB storage. Even though it didn’t have as much space as the big ones, it was ideal for running and at the gym. I can’t seem to find it, though it must be around here somewhere. This is what it looked like though:
The iPod facilitated my transition from physical CDs to digital audio files. It was a hungry master that demanded frequent sacrifices of new material to ingest. I had started ripping my CD collection to iTunes even before I had an iPod, though my official CD archival ripping project (FLAC plus MP3) didn’t start until around 2009. But I also had to have a way of getting new music in that pre-streaming era. (Streaming did exist, but it wasn’t very optimized.) I would still occasionally buy CDs and rip them, especially if they weren’t available on any digital services. My main method of purchasing new music was a strange one indeed, for a very long time…
Next: Big Bytes
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