Geek On The Mountain

I imagine this is fairly obvious to anyone who has their music collection mostly contained on one computer/playback device, so I suppose this is more geared towards those who haven’t done this.

When I say MP3 I don’t really mean MP3. Insert your favorite codec here. It doesn’t really particularly matter, though it’s probably to your advantage to use DRM (copy protection) free formats. We’ve had most of our music on a computer for quite a while now. It was then that I realized the advantage of this and started to want a portable player with hard drive. To me it’s fairly simple. I have all kinds of old music that I otherwise wouldn’t usually listen to. The CD would sit unused for who knows how long. When browsing through CD’s I would end up picking something newer/more familiar to play instead of the older stuff, even though it of course has good music on it otherwise I would never have bought it in the first place.

If all I have to do is take 10 seconds to navigate through my music collection and then hit play, it becomes more desirable. For me even, I’ll just play a bunch of stuff randomly. I might not have chosen it, but when it comes on I’ll like it. This is the huge advantage of having all(or a good part) of your music at your fingertips.

My iPod (of course any portable player with a hard drive has more or less the same effect) just extends this. Now I can take my music with me. I’m also able to listen to it around the house more freely. Milenka and I have different musical tastes to some extent, and even though my computer will serve up all of my music to my stereo via TiVo, it’s often not an option because she doesn’t want to hear my crap . (On top of that too, a TiVo couldn’t organize music in a decent manner to save it’s life. It’s good for listening to a specific album, but unless I want to start messing around with my directory structures (I don’t….who would?) it can’t get more inventive than that.)

That said, it’s import for us to have the right to use our music this way. I’m sure that the RIAA would prefer that we not do this because suddenly our music is easy to share when its in this format. They think this leads to huge amounts of lost revenue, which it probably doesn’t (how much is hard to say, but their numbers are surely inflated). If anything, they’d prefer everything be stored in some copy-protected format where you’d be limited in one of various ways to how you can copy your music. Could you imagine buying a new computer but being unable to copy your music to it and then having to buy it again? Sure sounds good to me…This last paragraph doesn’t have much of a point beyond it’s important that we maintain a right to use our music as we choose after we’ve purchased it. This doesn’t mean that we should be allowed to just give out free copies to everyone so they don’t have to buy it, but it also doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be able to give a copy to someone to try out. It also doesn’t mean that we should be restricted in how we use our own music just to stop said copying.

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