There was a time when you had to have a stack of stereo components to listen to your music. Nowadays, a standard desktop or laptop computer can be used to retrieve, store, and serve up your music. That doesn’t mean your compact discs are obsolete yet, but I’ve found that the hundreds of CDs I have are stacked nearly permanently in various locations around the house, serving more as backup media than as listening discs.
The iPod revolutionized music listening by allowing folks to carry whole libraries of songs around in their pockets. When I got my first iPod in 2002, I was able to store most of my music on it. As time went on though, I found that carrying that much music was overwhelming, and today I settle for smaller (and cheaper) units with modest storage. I don’t want or need to carry around the equivalence of 600 record albums. I would rather build a number of good playlists of 10-20 tunes each, and use them for a few weeks before I replace them with new ones.
Getting setup for digital music is really easy assuming you have some core items: a computer, sufficient hard drive storage (either onboard your computer or as an external hard drive), speakers, and software to retrieve, process, store, and play your music. (My setup is made up of a Power Macintosh G5, several external hardrives, a set of Klipsch 2.1 speakers, and an assortment of software, anchored by the Apple music database called iTunes—but you don’t need all that!).
External drives are pretty inexpensive, and most people will find that they can do with a $99 250-megabyte drive that will easily store all of their music for years to come. Digital music files come in several types with various levels of fidelity. Most people can do with what’s called an mp3, which requires between 2 and 3 megabytes per song. For folks who demand more clarity and fidelity (you know who you are), you’ll need more storage. The one I use, called Audio Interchange File Format (aiff) files, take up considerably more space than mp3 files because, unlike mp3, they do not lose any audio data when compressed.
Once you have your core setup, getting and storing music is easy. I use iTunes because of its intuitive design, ease of use, and ability to store all of my music—whether it’s music I buy from the iTunes store or some other vendor, or CDs I import into iTunes, or the various share-friendly music sites around the Internet. There are other music databases out there as well, and their use is really dictated only by your personal preference. Here are two: urge.com (www.urge.com/index.jhtml) and emusic (www.emusic.com/browse/all.html).
Last month I suggested that you go to archive.org and explore the Live Music Archive. I recently wanted to listen to some of the latest jam band concerts. The concert I picked was Disco Biscuits Live at Sunset Stage @ Langerado Music Festival from March 8, 2008. There are about 20 songs for this show on Live Music Archive, so I decided to pull a few, including Tomorrow Never Knows and Story of the World. I downloaded the 64kbps mp3 files by clicking on them, and then dragged the newly downloaded files into my iTunes window, which loaded them into the database. In a flash I was groovin’ to the Disco Biscuits.
Sounds easy and it is. We’ll look at more sources for share-friendly music next time. Until then, pick a few bands out from the archive list and download some tracks.
