Tag: cassette

Motorway madness

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I’ve seen a lot of the M6 in the last few months. I’m still hospital visiting. Not only that but part if the family have now moved to Wales so that’s been the scene of one or two days lately too. Sunday was possibly the hottest day of the year and I found myself stuck in a traffic jam. A one hour journey  took two hours. There was a air show. I didn’t know and wound up in the queue. Still I had my new best playlist to keep me company.

Does anyone else make playlists for specific  purposes? For years I’ve curated lists for friends themed birthday parties (which reminds me there’s a baby shower soon I wonder if they need one?). I love making what are effectively musical mood boards. Give me an era or a topic or a state of mind I’ll match it to some tunes. I can go full classical to.pop and rock, folk to funk and everything in between. My love of obscure songs from niche genres takes me down many a rabbit hole. There’s a playlist on spotify called crate diggers which hales back to a time when we used to have actual physical objects to play our music from not this ethereal digital mess. We’ve lost so much. Yes, the crackle, hiss and annoying jump of scratched vinyl but also so many B sides and album tracks in a world where the greatest hits are on demand.

I still buy physical cds and vinyl where I can. I still own a cassette player too, not to mention the 78s (ask your gran). I’ve not yet found anything play a wax cylinder though but I’ve seen one in action. Which reminds me I need to add a Madness track to my motorway list… which is where I came in.

Tuning in again

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I noticed an article on my social media feed this morning (yes, I’m a tea in bed scroller) stating that some folks are able to upgrade lovely old ipods. Now I adore my old beast and music uninterrupted and off grid so, obviously, this struck me as an excellent idea. I fired up the web browser in search of a local ‘modder’ and found one who definitely recommended backing up the music library before having a new disc and battery set in place. Hmmmm… This, of course, meant either firing up the ancient mac or finding a way to put the library onto the windows machine. Given that the mac is buried in the kitchen under a pile of hobby projects I found my way to the ‘store’ where I was delighted to find that it is now possible to log in to my apple account from the laptop after downloading the appropriate software. That was over 5 hours ago.

I mean I understand that the disc on the ipod needs to be formatted to windows and that doing so blanks the memory. It now seems that in order to access the said tunes I need to download the lot, album by album, to the laptop. Hence 5 plus hours…. If this doesn’t work I’m going to be a bit cross. … and I’ll have to dig out the old mac.

Actually one of the joys of watching each song as it slips into my library is that I’ve had a joyous (if unproductive) afternoon listening to half forgotten tracks from way longer ago than I care to remember. I do have most of my music in physical form. Call me ancient but I can still play those tracks deleted from the store on tape (yes, I have a cassette player. 80s style and huge), vinyl or even on CD. There’s been a box of 7″ singles (ask your grandparents) sitting in the living room begging to be played for some time now with all their crackle and hiss.

It could be nostalgia. All the get rich gurus tell me that owning stuff is so last century and I’m sure that piles or dusty old albums are cluttering up my karma somehow but I make no apologies for my love of the physical, hold it in your hands, pleasure of setting a disc or cassette into the appropriate player and sitting back to listen to a whole album, not or shuffle or anything. Very meditative … well, depending on your choice of genre but to each their own.

Its up to R now in my downloads. Next trick will be to upload the new CDs through the external disc drive I bought for the laptop. They don’t have them anymore since no one wants them apparently. I mine for retro gaming with actual games not an emulator. Even after the apocalypse given a solar panel and a battery to store the power I will still have my tunes. Failing that the world will have to suffer my harmonica playing.