What is this?
It would be unseemly for me to express fully my delight at finally getting an mp3 jukebox of my very very own. I’m so late to the party that the other guests are already wiping their breakfast crumbs away. And although it has been a dream of mine since before the birth of the codec to carry all the music I love around with me in my pocket, having all that storage capacity (sixty gigabytes!) literally at one’s fingertips is not without its difficulties.
For one thing, I have been acquiring mp3s for about six years. These have been moved and copied and re-tagged and siphoned onto disk so frequently that it took me a whole weekend to find them and get them onto the player. Even then there were several artists whose stuff had somehow failed to surface, and their resurrection entailed a lot of ferreting around on Torrentspy or in my stacks of those peculiar silver disks we used to buy.
In their way even more irritating are the duplicates, of which there are I’m not sure how many. I thought I’d trashed the player through my obsessive tidiness a few days ago, when I expunged one copy of ‘Sugar Hiccup’ (which Cocteau Twins knowitalls will be aware appeared on an album and an EP), only to have it crash midway through. Happily I am surrounded by Creative Zen experts and after a bit of head-scratching, paperclip unbending and apparently random buttonpushing normality – and more importantly my music – was restored. (I haven’t dared check whether that duplicate actually got deleted, though.)
To further complicate things, my secondhand player came preinstalled – as so many do, these days – with forty gigs of Goth, Metal and, oh, Gothic Metal. If it had all been Peters And Lee I could have just dumped the lot, but I doubt they produced that many tunes. In any case, it’s unrealistic to expect a total blank. I bet every iPod in existence has at least one song on it I would like if I heard it. The difficulty is finding that haystack-needle. So I kept most of the stuff I didn’t know on the offchance. Space is limited, even with this amount of GB, so that’s where this blog begins: what goes off, and what goes on my Zen. If I’m undecided about something, it goes into purgatory, pending final judgement.
