digital music
20/01/09 15:42 Filed in: Music
At times I find myself something of a luddite. I’m resisting facebook and myspace, I tend not to carry my very, very out of date cell phone, and I still think blackberries are a kind of fruit. Despite that I seem to have embraced the iPod and iTunes over the years. I figure if I’m going to sell out to a company, then I could do worse than Apple for music (though I prefer to hide from thinking about DRM).
I recently finished loading all our old music CDs onto our home computer. We are up to almost 28 days of continuous music. What’s even more incredible, and I say this as a person with an interest in magnetic storage media, is that it all fits on my little iPod. Both mine and Kerri’s entire music collection now fits onto something smaller than my wallet, and I can listen to any part of it at any time. Even having talked about magnetic media so often, having been directly exposed to the research of people at IBM and Hitachi, I still find it rather odd and curious that ``everything” now fits in the palm of my hand. It’s always interesting when something is made real in a very personal way.
And that trend will continue a little while longer at least (though there are some rather interesting fundamental physical limits that we’re getting close to at the moment).