The gentle art of making frenemies; or, it's about time I cleared out my music folder
Record collections are a strange thing. For one thing, they're not record collections any more...they're either CD collections or (in my case) digital media collections. But, however you want to refer to them, they are a perfect encapsulation of the period, mood and place you were in at the time you acquired them. There are those items that everybody amongst your circle of friends had, like it was some kind of rite of passage (Rage Against the Machine by Rage Against the Machine is the synonymous one); there are those items that were the ‘oh, this will do’ part of the ‘3 for £20’ deals at HMV (hello Pablo Honey by Radiohead, which I only listened to once, and only half of it because it always, always sent me to sleep); those items that were bought in a state of nervous exhilaration because your current crush/boyf at the time was heavily into them and so you felt you needed to be too (I’m looking at you, Siamese Dream by The Smashing Pumpkins) and then there’s the flotsam and jetsam that just get caught up in your collection through various house-shares, flatmates and friends staying over who forget to take their CDs back with them and so you end up adopting it as one of your own (The Best of Life of Agony, The More Things Change by Machine Head and many, many others).
In the early 2000s, at about the same time I got my first MP3 player (and before all phones were smartphones), I decided that I should rip all my CDs to my PC; well, at least the ones I listened to the most. I wasn’t quite ready to give up the physical objects (yet), even though most of the time I played my CDs on my PC through tinny speakers rather than hook up my stereo.* So, my music was digital via the old-fashioned method but I still had CDs cluttering up the place.
A few years later, when I was getting ready to move house and I realized that I really didn’t want to be shifting boxes of stuff from one house to another, I decided to be really radical and rip all my CDs to my PC, regardless of the last time I had actually listened to them, and send my eclectic 10 years+ collection of CDs over to Music Magpie.
It’s funny to think that my copy of Smash by The Offspring is probably floating around a branch of That’s Entertainment.
Anyway, fast-forward to modern day…today in fact. All of my music is now digital, acquired through various means {ahem}. Which means, even though I no longer have the actual physical objects cluttering up my front room, I still have MP3 files cluttering up my PC. And those li’l buggers have a strange habit of popping outta nowhere. They mutate and multiply when you’re not looking. Moving folders of music from one device to another seems to act like a transanimateobjectifier**. I have songs in my collection I have no idea where they came from. Did that copy of Love in an Elevator by Aerosmith come from old phone my mum gave me when mine packed in? And since when did I download an entire album by Katy Perry?
And so, the painstaking task of going through my music folder and deleting all those weird and wonderful songs is upon me. The only difference is, this time around I can’t sell them on; so I’m not gaining ££$$, just GB.
Suede? - DELETE
Gary Numan? – DELETE
Get the Funk Out by Extreme? – DEL…oh, actually, I might keep that one ;P
* No change there then, as I sit in my chair, laptop on my knee, listening to my music collection now stored on Google Play Music. The only difference is, I no longer have a stereo.
** +50 points if you get that reference. –100 points if you have to go to Google.
In the early 2000s, at about the same time I got my first MP3 player (and before all phones were smartphones), I decided that I should rip all my CDs to my PC; well, at least the ones I listened to the most. I wasn’t quite ready to give up the physical objects (yet), even though most of the time I played my CDs on my PC through tinny speakers rather than hook up my stereo.* So, my music was digital via the old-fashioned method but I still had CDs cluttering up the place.
A few years later, when I was getting ready to move house and I realized that I really didn’t want to be shifting boxes of stuff from one house to another, I decided to be really radical and rip all my CDs to my PC, regardless of the last time I had actually listened to them, and send my eclectic 10 years+ collection of CDs over to Music Magpie.
 |
| This guy's clearly saying 'gimme more stuff!' |
Anyway, fast-forward to modern day…today in fact. All of my music is now digital, acquired through various means {ahem}. Which means, even though I no longer have the actual physical objects cluttering up my front room, I still have MP3 files cluttering up my PC. And those li’l buggers have a strange habit of popping outta nowhere. They mutate and multiply when you’re not looking. Moving folders of music from one device to another seems to act like a transanimateobjectifier**. I have songs in my collection I have no idea where they came from. Did that copy of Love in an Elevator by Aerosmith come from old phone my mum gave me when mine packed in? And since when did I download an entire album by Katy Perry?
And so, the painstaking task of going through my music folder and deleting all those weird and wonderful songs is upon me. The only difference is, this time around I can’t sell them on; so I’m not gaining ££$$, just GB.
Suede? - DELETE
Gary Numan? – DELETE
Get the Funk Out by Extreme? – DEL…oh, actually, I might keep that one ;P
* No change there then, as I sit in my chair, laptop on my knee, listening to my music collection now stored on Google Play Music. The only difference is, I no longer have a stereo.
** +50 points if you get that reference. –100 points if you have to go to Google.
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