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my ipod was killed by the flaming lips

well, not really. I was on the subway and my ipod suddenly froze in the middle of "Do You Realize". So I restarted it and the sad ipod icon came up. It's like the equivalent of getting the bomb icon or the sad mac icon in system 9. So now I have to drag my sorry ass over to the apple store and probably get the hard drive replaced.

I was just thinking the other day about how my listening habits have changed over the years with technology. I was the kid who had a portable cassette player with her at all times. I would drag around at least 10 tapes with me in a giant neon pink fanny pack (i swore i never wore it, i just used it for storing my tapes and game boy). I am also embarrassed to say that I joined Columbia House in the sixth grade. (10 free cassettes?? hell yea!) I'd make mix tapes from other tapes and records and listen to them straight through, because i knew that fast-forwarding or rewinding would totally drain the batteries. Remember how you knew that your batteries were running out? The song would get slower and slower and slower.....Besides, do you know how hard it is to find the beginning of a song on a cassette? I put up with the scratchy sound and only being able to listen to the number of tapes I could carry.

Then the portable CD player became ubiquitous just as I was making the transition to CDs in middle school, so I saved up some money and bought myself one. What sucked: no more mix tapes. No one had figured out yet that you could organize music on your computer and burn it to a disc. Hell, people were just getting their first home computers and Prodigy and BBS's were the hot thing. At least you could skip a song without it draining your batteries. But another major point of suckage: the first generation CD players were HEAVY and BIG and they skipped ALL THE TIME. They also ate batteries like there was no tomorrow (although I am proud to say that I got a set of rechargeable ones). The more buffer time a CD player had, the more expensive it was. I still had to carry around discs, and again only as many as I was willing to carry. Plus that meant that the chance that a CD would get scratched and ruined was much higher. At this point I was still making mix tapes from CDs, so I was carrying around a CD player AND a tape player AND CDs AND tapes.

So this whole method of listening went on for a while, pretty much into college. Then I fell into a weird technology called minidiscs. Mainly because you could record audio through a mic that sounded way better than what you could record to a cassette - I had a radio show with a friend and that's how we ended up recording our broadcasts. Ripping CDs still wasn't quite viable yet - hard drive space was still expensive. So at least now I didn't have to lug around cassettes because I could make mixes on minidiscs, but recording everything was still in real time. Plus I had to transfer everything to minidisc - the format never caught on here so you couldn't buy albums directly on minidisc. Plus now I was carrying around 10 minidiscs at any given time, and often I'd misplace them.

Then came the era of ripping CDs. My friends and I started making mixes for each other. Which was cool. Except that you still had to carry around a CD player. Yes, they didn't skip as much, and they were lighter, but there was still something missing. Mp3 players started appearing - they were promising, but they had crappy interfaces and puny storage capacities.

Then Apple came out with the ipod. It was like nirvana. It's the way that I've been wanting to listen to music since I had my very first cassette player.

Damn you, Apple. I funnel hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year into your pocket and I've had three of your products (2 ipods plus dual G5 tower) die on me over the few months. Am I cursed? Or maybe your products are just crappy. But unfortunately I am just going to crawl back to you every time this happens because there isn't any other company out there that comes close to how you've changed the way that I listen to my music, and HOW I've wanted to listen to my music. Damn you!

Posted by tracie at March 15, 2007 10:38 AM