The Irvania Blog

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last forty-nine years, it’s that I’m going to want to be listening to my music until the day I die. When I’m old(er) and grey(er) and living in the old wargamers’ home, I’m still going to want my tunes.

I’d mentioned previously that I’d been working on a long-term project to migrate all my music cassettes, about 250 of them, to audio CD.This is one of my “archive” projects, collectively attempting to salvage as much of my music, movies, and computer software as possible and prepare it all for the future.

It took nearly five years to transfer all the music cassettes to audio CD, but now that portion of the project is done and I’m starting to worry about future migrations. I don’t want to have to spend another five years migrating it all again the next time a major media shift comes around.

My music collection is now of course much larger than what was on those 250 cassettes; I bought a lot of CDs after my cassette-centric years. Hanna has a lot of CDs, plus about 50 more cassettes that I need to convert to audio CD. I haven’t gotten around to counting yet, but my rough guess is that between us we have something over 700 music CDs. (And none of it is country-western music, if anyone is curious.)

When the next media format comes out, whatever and whenever that is, I don’t want to have to buy all that music again. I already bought it. I paid for it. Some of my recordings I’ve bought two or even three times: in pre-recorded cassette form, in vinyl album form, and in audio CD form. Alan Parsons, Kate Bush, Judie Tzuke, Heart, and the Cars owe me a break on this one.

I realize the music industry is trying to sort itself out in these times of technological shiftitude, and that they would really like to move all music sales to a model in which the consumer “rents” music rather than buys it, some form of subscription model, but I don’t want any part of that. I want to buy music, I don’t want to rent it.

My main concern is the permanence of the music. In the old days, I bought a vinyl record or a CD and it was mine, to listen to as often as I wanted. I still have all the music CDs I bought and will hang onto them until, for whatever reason, I can’t play them anymore. I gave away all my vinyl records a few years back (a move I’m still kicking myself over) but I still have about 85% of the cassette tapes I’ve ever owned, and they’re all still playable. The CDs and cassettes are permanent, in the sense that they’ve survived for decades and will survive for several more decades if I have anything to say about it.

What’s next after CDs?

The newer media out there concern me because they don’t have that same sort of permanence. The MP3 players, iPods, and other electronic storage doo-dads are very nice and have some wonderful features, but they have a very limited lifespan. The “cool” ones especially have a limited life expectancy, not necessarily because they’re likely to break, but because the owner is going to want to replace them with a newer and cooler model after six months. When you get a new one, you can hopefully transfer your tunes from your last player, but the tunes have to come from somewhere.

Ditto that for storing your tunes and listening to them on your computer. Most home computers last for several years (my main computer is now nearly six years old (gasp!) and I have computers in the basement dating back to the mid-1980’s, still fully functional) but let’s face it, one good hard drive crash and your tunes are toast. Besides, I don’t have a hard drive big enough to store all 700+ music CDs at audiophile quality level and all my tank games at the same time.

Downloading music from the Internet has a lot of advantages, if you can find what you’re looking for. Even back when Napster was at its height, I don’t think it had a lot of bagpipe music available.

Well, cassette players are still around (in decreasing quantity and quality) and probably will be for a while. I think it’s safe to assume that some form of CD players will be around for another 15 or 20 years. But what then?

I know, you don’t care about any of this if you don’t have a significant investment (in terms of money, time, and/or emotional attachment) to a large music collection, and you’re probably wondering why I’m blathering on about this. Maybe you’re right.

I have all the music I’ll ever need. As long as I can keep listening to it, I’m set for life. Maybe I don’t need to buy any more music.

We were chatting with friends the other week and the subject of the latest storm-ravaged portion of the world came up. Monsoon damage in Kansas or something like that, I don’t remember exactly. Hanna replied that she hadn’t heard anything about it and I explained that we don’t watch the news anymore, so we’re almost completely out of touch with current events.

“What do you guys do at home?” one of our friends asked.

“We listen to music a lot,” I said.  We usually have some form of music playing, either satellite radio or CDs. Every corner of our house has either a TV wired up to the satellite system or a music player of some sort. I even have a 26-year-old cassette player on my workbench for listening to tunes in the garage.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt enriched that Hanna and I have so much music in our lives. I remembered vague mutterings from people in the 1980’s who complained too many people had their TVs or stereos on all the time, as if they were trying to drown out the silence, as if they were afraid of the silence.

I don’t think that’s the case with Hanna and me. We sit outside for hours, listening to the birds and the squirrels and the sounds of the creek across the road. Even in the house we’ll have hours of silence, then Hanna will put on her favorite easy listening station or I’ll put some classical music in the CD player.

I don’t know if I can explain just how, or how much, the music enhances our lives. If you don’t like music, you wouldn’t understand anyway, and if you do like music you already know what I’m talking about.

Tell you what: load up Pat Metheny’s album Secret Story and go to the twelfth track, The Truth Will Always Be. (There’s a video of the song here on YouTube.)

If that doesn’t knock your socks off, I’ll just say that Hanna and I really like music, and leave it at that.