Cassette Jam '05

Some Japanese guy has made a page of all kinds of old cassettes. Really brought me down Memory Lane. Or is that Memorex Lane. (Sorry, couldn't resist. I can always edit this out later.)

To the left is one of my favorite cassettes of all time: The Maxell UD XL II. I asked my uncle to buy me a box of these for my bar mitzvah. He got me the 60 minute ones and not the 90 minute ones I wanted. Oh well. Storage has always been an issue for me.

Then again, I suffered various setbacks in personal audio throughout my life. It started with a low budget for music. In the late 80's I really wanted to get into the whole CD thing, but I couldn't afford it until the early 90's. Since then, I have had my entire CD collection stolen twice: once from my college dorm room and once from my car.

Then came the Napster Revolution. Suddenly I could get all the music I ever lost, and get turned onto music I always thought I would like. Again, storage became an issue. My six gig hard drive kept filling up. Instead of deleting I saved up for a CD burner. Every once and a while I would copy off all the mp3s onto disc archives and erase the hard drive. Then I got a second internal hard drive, and then a few years ago, I got an external enclosure for an internal drive. I filled it with an eighty gig drive, and thus, the "Big Momma" drive was born.

"Big Momma" was totally full in a year. And by then I was no longer downloading music. Napster got slammed and as I bounced around from Limewire to BearShare to Morpheus to Kazaa, I noticed that my computer would either slow down considerably or be seized by the effects of a virus or trojan horse or all of the above. Still, I needed more space. There are legal downloads like at web labels like Comfort Stand and the like. My friends have good CDs and I like to digitize them. I even buy CDs from time to time.

So then I got the "Rough Daddy" drive. Two hundred gigs. Again. Full in a year. Still out of space.

On the plus side. I've had a twenty gig mp3 player for about four yers now. It's like a dinosaur compared to the chic mp3 players of today. But I love it. It's thCreative Labs Nomad Jukebox 3. Looks like a CD player. I'll praise it more later, but here's my point: for a person with 200 gigs of music, 20 is really not a whole hell of a lot. The think would get filled up very quickly, and I'm the kind of guy that has a hard time deleting stuff. I mean, you never know when you would want to listen to some obscure track. And then there's the stock stuff. All the Steely Dan for those days, all the Theivery Corporation for those nights, lots of house and dance music which has been known to save my ass at a gig or two...

But recently I've been going through it and making cuts. Removed all but two Fila Brazillia albums: Maim That Tune and Jump Leads. You know what, I also left on Another Late Night. But other albums were not as lucky. I only left on the first four Cafe Del Mar albums, and I feel I could have been more selective with it like I was with the Om Lounge stuff. So now when I hit the randomizer on the Nomad, it does an interesting shuffle that can take you from the 80's to Sondre Lerche to Israeli Progressive to house to Rush.

Well, I'm off to play practice.

And this was supposed to be a very brief post.