Monday, June 10, 2013

TIMR 14: music collection

These are pictures of some of my music collection.  My main in-room cd selection can be seen in the banner - there are more in my roof. But these contain my digital collection and subsets which are what I mainly play from. 

Here, on the back of my desk, beside the Shinjuku Thief collected box is my main hard drive. 1Tb, my second drive, has everything I have digital and want to keep - self recorded vinyl, purchased mp3 and ripped CDs, downloads from the web (mainly from web labels). My first (smaller) drive is at work with a selection of the music - it is a bit frustrating at times when recent acquisitions or genres aren't there - but I can live with that. 

My main organizing principle is genre - I use it to group net labels (stasisfield or zeromoon are genres for example) or real labels (accretions, dorobo) or artists with a lot of representation (steve roden, muslimgauze, miles davis, taming power) & then all my own genres (such as electropop, ambient, environminimal, beaty, NZ, Nordic etc) to give a total of 107 genres for my 42736 items in 302Gb. 

And here, sitting on my pioneer sound system are three of my players. On the left my iPhod - my original 3GS phone which served me well as a phone, even after I killed the camera taking pictures in the rain, but has become effectively a touch once I upgraded to the 4. It's not pictured here, cause I use it to take the pictures, but it is part of my portable paraphernalia - it has a small memory so I just have a few artists that can provide instant solace - eno, roden, fripp, stafford. 

The old iPod doesn't get much use - its battery isn't charging but I've put some netlabels and harder stuff on it for those times you need an extreme. 

And then there is my Mambo X - my first player. I bought it because iPods were expensive and tied to iTunes and DRM. I looked at a lot of options & got this one because it had a line in with the ability to record. And my collection started by ripping CDs in soundjam but also hooking this up to my amp via the earphone jack and recording. It was lo bitrate, sometimes distorted (had to re record) and always a full side of vinyl. But despite that some of those recordings are still listened to parts of my collection. The Mambo sadly is of historic value only - the battery failed and the power jack got loose & wouldn't charge - and it's probably not worth getting fixed. Plus the folders/file interface was a little tedious!

Sitting on my kitchen sound system is the iPod classic - 120GB of the mainstreamish sort of stuff I can play in the 'public' areas of the house. It's probably the one I'll take away with me. 

And there is another one - an iPod touch which carol uses mainly for some podcasts. As my iPad is a work machine I have a few music apps (the Brian Eno range, figure, glassworks, mixtikl), but don't use it for storing or playing music. 

Sometime (most times) I think I have too much music. I remember the days when I only had a few albums and knew them all - and I can still sing the songs in my head. But while the choice can be overwhelming at times, I do like the thought of all the wonderful and varied music I can hold and listen to from these devices. 

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