the end of the ipod

[ian]

I confess I wasn't sure they were still going, but it seems Apple is discontinuing them. I'm of the age where I've segued through albums on cassette from Woolies¹ and top 40 singles² (what wasn't worthy of purchase with the limited funds available would be obtained by spending Sunday evenings with fingers poised over the record-play-pause buttons) to flipping through vinyl in Selectadisc³ to getting my first CDs⁵. Bootlegs and concert recordings would still be got from the market on cassette. Home taping was killing music, though judging by the content of my sister's Smash Hits, not nearly fast enough. Law had it that the purchase of any CD player had to come with either REM's Automatic for the People or Dire Straits Brothers in Arms, it was a rite of passage. As was being too cool to play either.

We had Walkmans (sexist, I know) that used to be the size of suitcases and then, in mere years, were smaller than the cassette itself, leaving its plastic arse hanging out to CD Walkmen and folios of CDs to take on trips⁶. Life was measured in boxes of cassettes and CDs and courtship was established through the mutual exchange of mixtapes. Only by the suitable exchange of music could the likelihood of further exchanges of bodily fluids become more probable. An unworthy selection (say Rock Me Amadeus) was that era's instant swipe left. There were minidiscs, but no one, not even the six people who adopted the format talked about them.

The iPod was revelatory. I think I splurged on the third-gen version with a capacious hard disk that swallowed my music collection whole after only two entire weeks ripping it to MP3 with a tool that made iTunes seem like the Best Software Ever Written. With a swirl of the wheel, every song I ever owned. I think more latterly I got an iPad touch and then came the phones and the great slaughter of the devices. I just dug out of the drawer of technological archaeology and they both, with a bit of juice (and a firewire cable for the first), still work. One day, thousands of years in the future, when aliens come to Earth to ponder the demise of humanity, they will find these devices and entire fields of research will be formed around the social relevance of our music collections. Who was this Amadeus and why did he feel the need to rock people?

Of course, now we've gone further, and everything is streamed (leastways in the Asbestos Palace) and the masses of CDs are banished to the garage and bags of cassettes and mixtape frustrations and battleship-heavy boxes of vinyl to the loft.

¹a famous shop, where once-upon-a-time children learned to shoplift pick n mix or spend their paper round money on such top 40 classics as Rock Me Amadeus.

²small plastic disk containing two songs, to be cool you always had to tell everyone the b-side was best. It rarely was.

³a record shop 'down Nottingham' - most towns had them, filled with acres of browsable records, and – as a boy – you'd always end up buying something you didn't really want in an effort to impress a girl⁴ with your ineffable cool.

⁴she wouldn't be impressed and you'd end up with another compilation of b-sides.

⁵now primarily used to scare birds and bemuse children.

⁶you'd take fifty, and always not have the one you wanted to listen to.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Picking up on the theme of music to impress girls, and levering in an unnecessary reference to

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cycling

I've just been reading The Wind at my Back, in which the author talks of his love of techno and 90s raves, in part because it was purely about music and dancing and nothing to do with impressing girls (or boys).

[Mr Larrington]

Because the useless workshy twats* at Chillblast have still not even started  building my new PC I confected some SCIENCE the other day to ascertain which bits of the music library were not ripped at 320 wossnames per thingamajig.  There are a lot.  Of them.  Hence my Copious Free Time is currently occupied with feeding CDs into the insatiable maw of an Asus external CD drive and wondering why some get read at 20x while others struggle to reach 4x.

* TBF they’re probably waiting for parts supplied by the fiendish Godless hordes of Beijing which cannot be delivered because plague/container shortages/Brexit (strike out words which do not apply)

[Kim]

I mostly missed the portable MP3 (other codecs are available) player phenomenon.  I was an early adopter during the MiniDisc renaissance of the mid-1990s, and my long-suffering MZ-R30 served me well into the mid noughties.  (It still works, if you hook it up to a bench power supply and ignore the missing screws and scary grinding noises.  Got to love 1990s Sony gear, from before they eschewed engineering in favour of becoming a DRM company^[1].)

By that point, I'd had the misfortune to try to troubleshoot the Windows version of iTunes, which swore me off Mega-Global Fruit Co products until such a time as I would be able to afford a Mac.

I bought one of those Sansa Clip things by the time MP3 players were cheap enough to be ubiquitous, but it was about 5 minutes later that it became entirely reasonable to let your mobile phone handle all your music-playing needs.  Especially if, like me, you lost the plot of new music towards the end of the MiniDisc era, and mostly listen to the same couple of dozen albums.


AIUI, later iPods were basically iPhones without the cellular bit, which seemed a little pointless, other than as something to give to rich brats that would keep them out of trouble.

But I think the fundamental change in how we listen to music (picking individual tracks on a whim or at random, rather than albums (playlists, of course, were invented in the cassette era)) came with WinAmp (hat tip to Napster and everything that came after it).  The iPod just made that portable and mainstream, like the iPhone did for pocket computing devices.


_{[1] Remember Zip disks?  Ever wondered why they weren't MiniDiscs?  Yeah.}

[pcolbeck]

Agree Kim.

Apple have never really invented anything. They are essentially a UI company. They take stuff that's already out there and give it a make over so its shiny and usually easy to use.

[Kim]

Credit where it's due, they've been extremely good at it.  Just don't let them write applications for Windows.

[fd3]

But I think the fundamental change in how we listen to music (picking individual tracks on a whim or at random, rather than albums

Which is sick and wrong!

[Cudzoziemiec]

But I think the fundamental change in how we listen to music (picking individual tracks on a whim or at random, rather than albums

Which is sick and wrong!

It's "wrong" when applied to many albums of the Age of the Album, let's say broadly early 1960s to very early 21st century, which were conceived to be played in a certain order. Most obviously so with prog rock albums where all the tracks merge into one (but most of those are better left behind in the great recycling bin of history anyway). It's right with anything released as a single and with albums made before and after that era. It's wrong if it means playing movements of classical symphonies out of order but right when applied to classical music that's only been put on an album together because it's "great piano concertos" or "famous German composers" or whatever. But it also runs the risk of turning any music at all, of any genre, into what telephone call centres do with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which makes it very, very wrong (and sick).

[Kim]

To be fair, most 21st century music sounds the same, so it doesn't matter what order you play it in   

And yes, there's a whole generation of disabled people who are traumatised by Vivaldi.  There's no reason hold music has to be the same track on an endless loop, other than copyright lawyers.

[ian]

I think the iPod touch was basically a statement of YMAWBTFP. Apple at least seemed to have learned the lesson of writing software for Windows (using Safari on Windows was a perversion too far), the current Music app is rather good, though I mostly use it on the phone/iPad since streaming removes the need for the dreaded synchronization, something that yoreish iTunes always aspired to fuck up in new creative ways.

I still mostly add entire albums, but also increasingly individual tracks, but most albums after a couple of listens get turned into a few liked tracks and added to playlist of recent and older stuff I like. Life is too short to be listening to filler. Or prog rock.

*You Might as Well Buy The Fucking Phone. Which I did.

[Cudzoziemiec]

To be fair, most 21st century music sounds the same, so it doesn't matter what order you play it in   

Congratulations, here's your Old Buggers Bus Pass and a lifetime subscription to the Daily Express!

[fd3]

To be fair, most 21st century music sounds the same, so it doesn't matter what order you play it in   

Another basic error if you're listening to anything post 2000.

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The exception being post 2000 stuff released by pre 2000 bands

[rafletcher]

That announcement, what I saw last evening, solved the "what do you want for your birthday, dear" conundrum, as my wife is an avid user of her current, ageing iPod Touch, having already worn one out (the home butten went and hid somewhere inside it).  As she was of Walkmen before - she has truoble sleeping, a symptom of her bipolar, and thus listens to audiobooks (or at least has them churning away) all through the night.  So, a nice new Blue backup iPod Touch (albeit refurbished) is winging it's way to her.  My relief, when she had to master one, after Walkmen became "vintage" and absurdly expensive, was much, as I no longer got awakened by the "cluck-clack" of a tape changing direction, nor the fumblngs when a new tape had to be inserted, or on some  occasions, unravelled from the innards in the small hours.

My cheery comment of "that'll see you out" was less appreciated.

[Lightning Phil]

Still use my iPod classic and on the bike it's hooked up to a blue tooth transmitter to talk to my bluetooth speaker.   It gets 36 hours play time between battery charges.   Which means the phone can be turned off unless I need it for something.

[lissotriton]

My first MP3 player had 32MB of memory. Could just about fit an album on there, at a suitably crappy bitrate.

I did have a Sansa Clip for a while. Was nice for when I didn't want to carry my phone, ie running. But now I just use my watch for that anyway.

[Lightning Phil]

A watch, I remember those, last wore one in 1994.

[ian]

Watches now, of course, are computers too. It's the gradual slide of every device to become an actual computer more powerful than the real computers of ten years before.

My drawer of technological archaeology is a mine of fascination. I have three – THREE – Palm Pilots¹. What decade of giddy mayhem led me to that, I don't know. I lived in the US I suspect, and as countries went, it was really late to the mobile phone party (I think work gave me one in the early 2000s, but they cut the cost of the bill by ensuring that it never had a signal). If I recall, the latter two of those had a decent mp3 player and an SD card slot (checks, a whopping 256 MB).

¹still sounds like a euphemism for a wanker.

[Mr Larrington]

The first time I reached the end of DJ Random's list of available tracks he insisted on playing Muse's fairly recently added “The Resistance”.  All of it.  In reverse order.  This does not work with concept albums.  Bad DJ Random

[Jurek]

I have an iPod Classic which I haven't used in a while.
When I found out that Apple were going to discontinue the iPod shuffle (the tiniest one they ever made) I bought about half a dozen of them (no display - a bit bigger than a postage stamp)
Each one of them currently holds music under one of the following titles:

Drum n' Bass (this works exceptionally well when travelling by train, ever since they welded up all of the joints in the railway tracks)
Classical to fall asleep to.
Classical to ride into battle with.
Music to smash up furniture to.
Spaced out and Ambient.
You get the picture.
I still have a couple in boxes with unbroken seals.

Back in around 2008, I still had my first iPod classic (Series II I think - white, about the same size as a pack of 20 Bensons) dating back to around 2000. One of our drivers (spotty, aged around 19yo) clocked it on my desk.
'WTF is that?' was the best he could manage.

I still have a very lightly used Sony Mini Disc with loads of recorded discs.
Some cool music on there.
Kruder & Dorfmeister and that kind of stuff.
About a month after I bought the Mini Disc, Apple released the iPod.
How I laughed.

[Kim]

MiniDisc was an excellent design, and a worthy successor to the compact cassette.  Its heyday could have lasted a bit longer if Sony hadn't been more concerned about music piracy than making useful products.  But like everything else, it was doomed when Moore's Law started applying to flash memory, even if it survived that episode of Bugs.

Sony in 1993: "No of course we can't make a data drive that can use our robust 140MB magneto-optical discs, people might use it to copy music with their computers."
Omnes: "Bastards!" *Buys Zip drive*  *loses data to click-of-death*
Sony in 2004: "Hey, who wants to buy a drive that can write to our Shiny! New! 1GB MiniDiscs?"
Omnes: *listens to MP3s of crickets*

[Jurek]

The only thing that I have against the Mini Disc is that it is mechanically very noisy.
If you have the music turned down you can hear it grinding away.
I recently introduced my bezzie mate's 18yo daughter to the Mini Disc.
'Cor! the bass is really good on it'. Was the response.
I guess that's what you get from A Young Person who's music experience is usually via the speaker of their mobile phone.

[geraldc]

Around 2003 I was a massive Apple fanboy. I bought a second generation 16gb iPod. I had to install a FireWire card in my PC specially for it. This was pre iTunes, and I think I had to use real audio as the software. Does any remember Real Player?

I still remember learning graffiti to use on the first Palm Pilot. I think it was made by US Robotics, the people who made the modems. Last time I used a palm was a Sony Clie back in 2003. I remember at the time thinking what is this Bluetooth stuff they are banging on about, it will never catch on.

The talk about zip disks is giving me flashbacks, I remember pre broadband the company I worked for spent a ludicrous amount of money on an ISDN line so we wouldn't keep losing zip disks to the printers. Our ISDN line meant we could send stuff at 128kbps, but the company still ended up blowing a lot of money on zip drives, as we all took them home with all the mp3s we downloaded off Napster.

[Kim]

Does any remember Real Player?

Remember it?  I'm still waiting for it to finish buffering...

[road-runner]

When I found out that Apple were going to discontinue the iPod shuffle (the tiniest one they ever made) I bought about half a dozen of them (no display - a bit bigger than a postage stamp)

You win, Jurek. I have two iPod shuffles which still get used. The newer iTunes (AKA Music) does not work so well with them so I prefer to use my older Mac still with iTunes to manage the shuffles.

[Tim Hall]

I have an iPod Classic which I haven't used in a while.
When I found out that Apple were going to discontinue the iPod shuffle (the tiniest one they ever made) I bought about half a dozen of them (no display - a bit bigger than a postage stamp)
Each one of them currently holds music under one of the following titles:

Drum n' Bass (this works exceptionally well when travelling by train, ever since they welded up all of the joints in the railway tracks)
Classical to fall asleep to.
Classical to ride into battle with.
Music to smash up furniture to.
Spaced out and Ambient.
You get the picture.

Good titleage there. The last (my bold) is, I presume, tracks by the Shangri Las and similar girl groups.

Some years ago on Desert Island Discs, Nick Hornby (I think) chose an iPod as his luxury, rather pissing on Roy Plumley's idea of eight favourite records. Sue Lawley, for it was she, had to ask WTF an iPod was.