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Monday 6 February 2012

Music. So when was the last time you listened to a whole CD?

I was thinking the other day how in recent years the way we listen to music has changed. My thoughts were prompted when I realised its been more than 2 1/2 years since I've listened to a CD. Thinking about it, the only CD player I now have that works is in my car.


So what has changed for me? I was a fairly early adopter of MP3 players. Over six years ago I bought a Creative Zen Touch MP3 player, the idea of being able to carry my entire CD collection around in my pocket appealed to me.




It was at this point I stopped listening to whole albums and started to play my music on the random shuffle setting. I love listening to music like this because tracks get thrown out from the darkest corner of my music collection, and sometimes these long forgotten tracks are absolute gems.


MY zen MP3 player lasted over three years, but when I converted from PC to Mac at home I discovered my trustee MP3 player wouldn't connect to my mac and there was no mac compatible software for the device. 


So sadly my zen touch was retired and I converted to my iPod classic.



I love my iPod and via iTunes I have over 4400 tracks. I think my music consumption has changed, I tend to buy one or two tracks off albums now but via digital music stores I can access tracks from bands I loved as a teenager, guilty pleasures like A Flock of Seagulls, Visage, Gary Numan and Ultravox. My 80's music collection was mostly on cassette and it great to be able to rediscover how good (and naff) some of this music was.

I hope you don't think me as a philistine for on listening to my iPod on shuffle but as I said I love it when I get to hear a track I haven't heard in ages. Two recent favourites thrown out recently were Broken Land by the Adventures and From the Stars by White Lies.

3 comments:

  1. Aww man, I had one of those Zen Touches too, sadly a few months ago it completely crashed and hasn't worked since D: But it had so much of my music on it, I got to listen to loads of random stuff... Nowadays I have a much smaller iPod, so can't hold as much, so there aren't as many interesting random tracks on there, just stuff I really like...

    Reading this made me want it to work or to get a larger iPod/MP3 player :/

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  2. Thinking back, my zen touch was a great piece of audio tech, I think it also had better sound than the early versions of the iPod too.

    My first iPod classic broke 2 months ago, hard drive gave up. Traded in for a new one with 180Gb of storage, don't think I'm ever going to fill that!

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  3. I completely agree, I was devoted to the Zen Touch, found so handy to carry around, and I would probably also find it very hard to fill 180GB as well

    XD I've found the actual player and am going to replace the hard drive in it, see if that sorts it, the good thing is, it's easier to fix the Zen than an iPod XD

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