Musing on the present. Reminiscing about the past. Posturing for the future.
After a successful, short- but-sweet overnight backpacking trip Saturday night with friends, I decided to take the evening off from bloggings. Besides, I’m busy filling up my new iPod Classic with all sorts of new and improved music. So… I present to you… an easy Monday post:
Click over here for some “new” pictures of Keaton and the family from our October trip to Maui.
Enjoy.
Still nursing your Turkey hangover? Unfortunately, one of the negative aspects of traveling to family for Thanksgiving is that you often have to return home without having enough time to enjoy a proper amount of leftovers. Half the reason I love Thanksgiving is because a plate of gravy-drenched stuffing almost always tastes better at 10pm the night after Thanksgiving than it ever did at the table the day before. Next time, I’m packing a backpack with dry ice and taking home some turkey, all the trimmings, and a couple slices of pie. But, we did have to leave, and now that we’re back home the trip seems like it really flew by. I guess it’s never long enough when you’re on vacation…
Walking through the airport today, I had a thought: What if I was stopped, just as I was at that moment, and asked to take a detailed for-insurance-purposes-like monetary inventory of the goods I was carrying. Naturally, I started ticking off items in my head. Laptop, two iPods (not typical, but I had them both on this trip), cash, clothes, miscellaneous electronic accessories, gold rings, and the clothes I was wearing. Doing some mental arithmetic, always off by bit at best when I’m the mentalist, I was surprised to come up with a total in the several thousands of dollars. To think that people like me are so blessed that, at any given time, they have thousands of dollars of goods on their person, while there are people in the world who won’t go through that in their lifetime. Not that thousands would necessarily make those folks any more happy, it’s just pretty amazing the amount of material “wealth” we have with us in general. I complain because my laptop bag is heavy and uncomfortable to carry around when it’s got two iPods, a book, my $200 headphones, and a couple AC adapters in it. Guess I should be thankful I’m not on my barefoot way back from the river with a yoke across my neck, two buckets of water hanging from each end.
Let’s change gears now, and talk about iPods again…
I have so much room now, with my new Classic, that I’m having a great time decided what “new” things I can put on my iPod. I’d basically topped off my 60GB with what I thought was pretty much the best limited-to-60GB collection of tunes I could muster. But now, I can expand that collection more than 100%. Worried that I’ll end up putting some “just OK” stuff on there, and potentially pepper the “Shuffle All” feature with bad tracks, I made myself a promise that I’ll prune and manage the quality of the the new device just as diligently as I did on the old one. For starters, I’m going to load the thing up with Beatles bootlegs. Having nearly 32GB of Beatlegs in my collection, I had decided to leave them off the old iPod altogether. But, I’ve always wished I had at least a sampling loaded, as I feel like I now under-listen to what used to be a super-important kind class of albums to me. Problem is, I need to be careful about how I treat Beatles bootlegs, and for that matter, bootleg recordings in general, on the iPod. Because I have so many, I want to make sure that, between the Beatles’ commercial and bootleg releases, my iPod doesn’t get skewed too heavily to the Beatles. So, I’ll do this intelligently.
Well, sorry about all the iPod-themed entries of late… as you can see I’m having a little bit too good of a time configuring my new 160GB iPod Classic. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?
Thanks, and, see you back here Monday!
Happy Thanksgiving y’allz! We woke up early today, and spent the morning waiting around for the cast of Sesame Street to show up on the Macy’s parade (for Keaton, you know). After that, Sharaun and I took Keaton down to play on the little playground near here, and we kicked back family-style and watched a movie while she took her afternoon nap. And now, we’ve just finished our early-afternoon repast. Paying homage to the escapists whom we credit with kicking off the grand tradition. Turkey and dressing, with sweet berry-relish things should your tastes run that way (most most definitely do not). Sweet-potatoes and green beans. Fresh bread and gravy atop it all. And that’s not even dessert. Yeah, it was a good meal.
Oh, and, I wrote a whole lot about buying a new iPod… but I decided to make that an entry of its own. You can read it here (or just below), and that way we keep this entry nice and simple. Y’know, stick to a theme…
Happy Thanksgiving friends!
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Being in Oregon – the land of no sales tax – I decided there was no better time than now to go ahead and drop the dosh on one of those new-fangled iPod “Classics.” The 160GB-ness of the thing has been taunting me since the things were announced, and I knew it was just a matter of time before I upgraded. And, not only did I save the ~$25 sales tax I would’ve paid in California, but I also took advantage of the Costco price, which is already $10 less than Apple’s suggested retail price (iPod’s are rarely sold under this suggested price, especially by major retailers). So, all in all, I think I made out just about as good as can be. Took the thing home for $339 out the door. May sound expensive to those who could care less about 60GB vs. 160GB, but for musicophiles with platter-busting collections it really is worth it to carry around that much more variety.
So, last night I began trying to figure out just how in the world I was going to get all my music off my old iPod, and subsequently on to my new iPod. See, I manually manage my music on my iPod – I don’t use the iTunes library features to manage my music collection, and that means I also don’t use the “automatically sync” feature to get music on and off my device.
I realize this may put me in a minority of users, but, because 1) I don’t use iTunes to manage my music in general, and 2) my collection is larger than my iPod’s capacity, it’s just more convenient for me to drag-and-drop what I want when I want rather than relying on some selective sync functionality. Don’t get me wrong, I can see the plus-side to using the auto-sync functionality, like not having to completely delete and re-add things in situations where I’ve “updated” an MP3 folder/album on my hard drive, perhaps adding artwork or updating ID3 tags. But still, I prefer to do it manually.
Anyway, back to my problem. Surely someone has faced this before. Say you’re a manual iPod user like me (there has to be more of us out there, right?), and you outgrow your old iPod, or just figure the new one is plain “cooler,” and decide to upgrade to Apple’s latest offering. If you’re like me, you’ve likely spent a lot of time pruning, tending, and shaping the music (and other content) on your iPod, and you probably want to “start” with your new iPod having the same content as your old one, and then add new content from there. In other words, it’d be nice if the “baseline” content on your new iPod was a mirror image, or snapshot, of what all is on your old iPod. Makes sense, right? Think of it as “migrating” the entirety of your old iPod onto your new one.
Note: I’m aware that techniques exist for doing this using both iPods in disk mode, but I’m pretty sure that will only work on two iPod’s of the same generation (or, at the least, having the same database version). Since Apple changed the iTunesDB structure completely (version 25) going to the Touch/Classic sixth generation devices, I don’t think I can get away with doing something as easy as this when moving from a less-than-sixth generation one. But, honestly, I also didn’t give it a try.
Again, before you criticize me in the comments and tell me this would all be “easy as pie” if I just used iTunes to manage my music collection – I know. Trust me, I know. I just don’t want to use iTunes to manage my music, OK? Now that we’re done with that…
Now, even though I still have all the content that’s on my iPod stored on my PC, I don’t exactly know offhand what’s on there and what’s not. I have a general idea, but my collection is huuuge, and the best and easiest way to be sure I get an exact copy of my existing iPod content would be to simply “copy off” everything that’s on there and then move it to my new iPod. Sure, worst case, I could simply re-pick all the right content from my larger collection, but it would likely take me weeks to get just the right items (honestly, you may opt to do this… give yourself a “fresh start” and relive the fun that is filling your iPod with the perfect collection of music for the first time). So, again, we need to do the following things:
I’m gonna tell you how I did this, even though it was an imperfect process in the end (meaning, I didn’t exactly meet my own requirements above, as I lost the iTunes/iPod metadata). Ready? Here it is; it’s actually quite simple:
To be clear, SharePod does create an XML file which you can use via iTunes’ “Import” function. I originally thought that, since this XML file contained the metadata mentioned above, I may be able to preserve things like “play count” and rating, etc. when importing. Turns out, iTunes didn’t “get” the metadata, even when using the import feature and SharePod’s XML file (at least, for me it didn’t). So, the end result is that you’ll effectively reset all that data. You’ll lose play counts, ratings, last played dates, etc. It kinda sucks, but it’s better than nothing. And, as far as I was willing to muck with it, it was the best I could come up with.
There may be other ways to do this, using different software to achieve the same thing (especially since I’m only talking Windows here, and not Mac). But I think it all amounts to the simple process of 1) extracting the data from the old device and 2) putting back on the new device. I would love to find a way to maintain the metadata (I know… you’re going to say, “Use iTunes to manage your music…”), but for now I’m happy enough to have a cloned copy of my old iPod as a starting-point for my new one.
But Dave, what about my playlists?
Look, I know that a lot of people have spent a big amount of time and effort making super-awesome playlists from the content on their iPods. For that reason, I can see why you’d want to make sure your playlists come over to your new iPod intact as well. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure how to do this, as I didn’t have any treasured playlists I wanted to bring over for my upgrade. I think, however, that you can use SharePod’s playlist export feature in much the same way as described above for tracks to accomplish the same thing. Export the playlist, which, I believe, amounts to exporting the songs that the playlist contains, and then import the playlist through iTunes using the XML file that SharePod creates.
Well, that’s it. That’s I how managed to transfer all the music from my old iPod onto my new iPod, and start with what’s essentially a carbon-copy of what I already had. Hope it helps someone who may find themselves wanting to do the same thing. Oh, and, by the way, if anyone has any suggestions or tweaks for this process (especially if you know how to do the above while keeping the metadata for the tracks), please leave a comment on this entry and let the world know! Thanks!
After writing this, I decided to try a bunch of commercially available alternatives to the method I describe above. For what it’s worth, all the software I tried was able to get the MP3s off the device. However, none were able to successfully preserve the iTunes metadata (things like playcounts, preset-EQ, date-added, skipcounts, etc.). My findings:
- CopyTrans: This application is supposed to copy music from your iPod and into your iTunes library. The webpage advertises full iPod Classic compatibility. Out of the four, CopyTrans got closest to what I want as it was able to import the playcount and date-added metadata into iTunes.
- iCloner : Part of the CopyTrans suite, this is like Ghost for iPods. It promises to make a “clone” backup of one iPod which can be restored onto another iPod. The functionality is there: I “cloned” my 5G iPod and then restored the image onto my new 6G iPod. However, the 6G with the restored 5G image was still unrecognizable to iTunes, and the music would not play. I also noticed that, in disk view, the post-restoration 6G iPod was truly a “clone” of the 5G (which is a bad thing, since Apple changed the folder and database structure from 5th to 6th generation). Even though the website claims full iPod Classic compatibility, the version of iCloner I used couldn’t do 5G-to-6G. Interestingly, I have to think that iCloner may indeed be a “real” solution to my problem if I was trying to move from one same-generation iPod to another. And even though I haven’t tested it, I would expect iCloner to make a carbon-copy, including all meta-data, if the target iPod is of the same generation as the source.
- Music Rescue (formerly PodUtil): Music Rescue also successfully exported the raw MP3 files, but was unable to preserve the metadata when importing the tracks iTunes.
- Amarok (Linux only): Although I didn’t run the test myself, I had a Ubuntu-loving buddy confirm that the latest version of Amorak (at the time of writing, at least) can export MP3s from iPods (all generations), and copy them back onto iPods (all generations). However, when testing specifically to see if the metadata can be preserved, nothing was imported.
- iTSfv (iTunes Store File Validator): This tiny piece of free and versatile software can do lots of neat things with your iTunes music library, and has an extremely promising tab called “Backup/Restore.” At first glance, this tab appears to contain the holy grail: The ability to export an XML file containing only the not-in-ID3 metadata for your tracks, along with another option to “restore” the data in the resulting XML file back “over top” of another library (iTSfv looks for matching song titles, and writes the saved metadata on a hit). Unfortunately, it looks like iTSfv can only export this data from tracks that already “live” in an established iTunes library, and not directly off of an iPod. Too bad, because it looks nearly perfect for what I want. However, being that iTSfv is open-source, I’m actually tinkering with the idea of modifying it to work directly off the iPod… keep your fingers crossed.
So, again, overall it seems like there are a lot of solutions to reclaim your actual MP3 files from an iPod and move them to a new one (regardless of iPod generation). However, based on my research, I cannot find any reliable application to reclaim files and metadata – specifically going from a pre-6G device to a 6G one. So all you people who manually manage your music, and want to upgrade your iPod Photo to an iPod Classic… get ready to lose your metadata.
Again, commentary welcome!
Oh, and hey, before I go… and also iPod related…
On another note, I’m with this poster… I’d love it if Apple allowed you to group the tracks within a playlist by album or artist. This way, you could open a “New Music” playlist and see, not a huge list of songs, but instead, a nice tidy list organized albums or artists, to which you could further drill-down to track level. I know this isn’t useful for most folks who don’t view their music from an album-level of granularity (rather than just a “loose” collection of tracks), but since I tend to listen to music as albums moreso than a string of singles – it would indeed be useful to me. Anyway, would be nice to see in a future firmware… is all I’m sayin’.
Until later, take care.
Still rainy and cold in Oregon, melancholy. I was supposed to do something with my brother last night, but he called and bailed after work. So, I stuck around my folks’ place and made a sandwich and a bowl of soup for dinner. A glamorous evening it was not. I thought about maybe going to see a movie, I’ve never gone to a movie by myself… could’ve been an interesting experience. But, in the end, I sat there on the couch with this laptop on my knee, oscillating between dozing and waking while the Grateful Dead station on Sirius played in the background.
Woke before the sun this morning to venture out into the frigid pre-morning and ride the train to the airport with my mom. And, after meeting up with Sharaun and Keaton, we hopped right back on for the reverse trip. Getting to the airport about a half and hour early, however, we had some time to sit around in the lounge area where people await their arriving friends and relatives. Sitting there, I found myself smiling as people leapt up to greet those coming from the terminal. Grandfathers beamed as little kids ran up to them, hugging their legs before being swept up into their arms. Fathers gripped and snatched up children two at a time. People whose faces said they may have been sisters shrieked and hugged while commenting on new haircuts and how good it was to see one another. It truly was a fun thing to sit and watch. Got me thinking, in fact, that someone could make a great short film of holiday airport receptions. Also got me thinking, I should totally do it. All you need to be a filmmaker these days is a camera and a PC anyway…
Movie or not, I decided that, if and when I ever become a solitary old man whose filled with bitterness, I’ll remedy the situation by going down the airport on the day before Thanksgiving, or Christmas Eve, and watching friends and family reunite. It really is a remedy for the I-me-mine mentality.
And… before I leave you. GetReligion, one of the best religion-focused blogs on the ‘net, has an interesting and well-rounded article on some recent changes made to the introduction to the Book of Mormon. I’ve been somewhat critical of the Latter Day Saints here on sounds familiar before, but this article is pretty well balanced. Read it up if you’re still hankering for some more writin’.
Until tomorrow, I hope you get safely where you’re going and into the arms of who you’ll be with this Thanksgiving. Peace.
It’s right cold here in Oregon, at least to someone who’s been enjoying unseasonable warmth in his own locality (y’know, that’s me I’m talking about). I arrived today and caught the train from the airport towards work, intending on catching the van at the end of the train which would take me the final miles to the local sawmill.
Turns out, through a miscalculation on my part, I had timed the whole domino of travel just wrong enough that I missed the last van, and had no way to make the final push to the cubicle farm. Instead, I got off the train near my folks’ place and began looking for a kind soul to give me a ride. When this fell through, and when the warm and dry comfort of my folks’ pace soaked into my bones, I decided I could do just as much in the remaining half of the day from the kitchen table with my computer and cellphone than I could at the office. And so, I waffled between the couch and table, watching the scant few e-mails trickle in – the holiday this week seems to have slowed things considerably.
Anyway, I’ll rise early tomorrow and dress warm so I can actually make my way into the office and get some things done. Sharaun and Keaton get here Wednesday, we’ll celebrate like Pilgrims and Indians makem-good-treaty on Thursday, and then fly home together Friday. It’s a quick trip, but it’ll be a good time to hang out. Oh, and, on Wednesday night we’re all (the young’ns, at least) going to see the Band of Horses play in downtown Portland. Should be fun, I haven’t been to a show here before, and haven’t been to one in general in a few months. Should be a good week… should be a good week.
I wore the jacket Sharaun got me last Christmas today, as I knew it would be cold in Oregon and it was somewhat chilly driving to the airport at 5am. It’s one of those sportscoat kinda things that people wear with jeans, but cut nice and a little fancy with its pinstripes on brown – I think the “real” word for it might be “blazer.” In fact, maybe you can tell me, as the post-accompanying image this day ’round is an ad featuring the exact jacket. Regardless of nomenclature, I’ve always wanted a “nicer” coat like that, and I only got to wear it a few times last year before the weather turned warm again. Today, I threw it on over some jeans, with some brown shoes and a lighter brown shirt underneath. Quite proud of what I’d done, I caught myself jamming my hands in my pockets, head down and slightly cocked as if there was a photographer rolling film while I waited in the security line at the airport.
With my little carry-on and laptop bag, and my iPod tucked safely in the inner breast pocket, I felt seriously dapper. Truth be told, the jacket is probably a bit mis-sized for me, as most bulk-made, three-sizes only, items tend to be, but I still feel like a million bucks in it. I know it’s a $100, somewhat ill-fitting, sweatshop-made thing, but when I put it on I feel mature, I feel established, I feel business. Funny, given how little I care about clothes. I’m gonna wear that thing out this week, so I’ll let you know if I get more phone numbers than I normally do, or perhaps more “sirs” when being spoken to. I’m sure I will, because… I mean… I’m wearing a damn blazer with jeans, people. It’s doesn’t get more haute couture than that, right?
Goodnight.
Monday my friends. An eventful weekend, that I wrote and wrote and wrote about… and then decided, in the eleventh hour, to scrap for this canned entry instead. Don’t discount it just because it’s been written for a while though, I promise it’s still good. As you read it, I’ll be flying north-by-northwise to Oregon for the week, where we’ll be spending Thanksgiving with the family. Wish me well, then, and I’ll hit you with some more words when I’m on the ground. Enjoy.
Often when I write, my memories pull me to things I’ve put down in words before. This entry is an example of that. I’ve written about the history and development of my love for music from multiple angles before, but not centered directly around the “record store” theme. And, that’s what the keyboard called my fingers to do today, write about my then-burgeoning musical fanaticism as related to record stores. Having written in bits and pieces about this already, I figured I’d link you to as much related content as I could query up, just in case you wanted to read the scattered version before the (hopefully better-reading) amassed version. So… links numbers: one, twain, and thrice.
At an early age, my obsession with the “record store” began. I guess the initial seeds were planted when my older cousin turned me on to Depeche Mode, sometime back when I was in the fourth grade. I can remember going into record stores at the mall and asking to see their Depeche Mode cassettes. I didn’t have money to buy them, of course, I just liked turning them over in my hands, looking at the artwork and reading the track titles. And, since, for some odd reason, the store in the mall kept the tapes behind the counter and the records out front, I’m sure I bothered many a clerk by having them retrieve stacks of tapes they were sure “that nine-year-old” wouldn’t buy. Over time, I learned to funnel the wee bit of discretionary income ten-year-old-me got away from Garbage Pail Kids and invested into music on tape. I began a small collection, mostly things like Depeche Mode, A-Ha, Pet Shop Boys, and the like.
Then, one day near the ripe age of twelve, our family went to visit my grandparents at their mountaintop house in Southern California. While there, my Depeche Mode introducing cousin, now himself settling well inside his teenage years, showed me the first “CDs” he had purchased. Apparently, his dad, my uncle had a new-fangled Edison that would play the odd, grooveless, silver discs. He had U2’s War and Joshua Tree, and he raved to me about them; I can still remember the passion in his young voice as he described just how good the music was on those little plastic things. It took me a while to make the conversion from cassettes to CDs though… several more years, in fact. Those buggers were expensive, and I could buy a humongous “brick” of 90min blank Maxells at K-Mart for like $10. Predictably, as I got a little older, and had a little more change in my pockets, my collection began skewing in the “dubbed a friend’s copy” direction. When I met Kyle after we moved to Florida, things exploded. With the influence his dad had on his extremely-mature-for-his-age and varied musical tastes, and the mainline connection to his dad’s collection in Texas (via dubbed cassettes again, but of course), my horde of lovingly hand-labeled 90min Maxells flourished.
Shortly thereafter, after I’d become teenage no-good in my own right, a little “record store” (although, there wasn’t a lick of vinyl but for the “DJ” albums in the back) opened up tucked into a corner of our local supermarket-anchored stripmall. Being only a few miles from my house, I used to ride my bike there regularly to peruse the selection. Owned by a middle-aged guy named Roland who had muscular dystrophy, or maybe ALS, I can’t be sure. He walked the store with the aid of those metal hand-gripped “wrist crutch” things, spoke with a thickly-slurred speech, and was actually a pretty ill-tempered guy – from what I could understand. For the most part, though, the store was “run” by a longhair in his early twenties. He was almost always there when I went in, and I used to remember his name, but it’s gone now.
At some point, in an effort, I’m sure, to flog dismal sales, Roland began offering his customers the option of “previewing” CDs. Previewing CDs was a relative new idea at the time, and plenty of stores were busy implementing in-store “listening stations” for the purpose. There was one key difference with Roland’s model, however, he let customers “preview” the discs overnight, for a $3 fee. Nevermind that this practice would be highly frowned-upon by the WEAs and Sonys of the world, it enabled him to make his cost back on the disc with just a couple “previews,” and you agreed to buy the disc if it came back in less-than-pristine state (only happened to me once, with Coil’s Stolen and Contaminated Songs. (If you haven’t heard that album, you likely never tried mushrooms in the 90s, and, unless you plan on trying them now, there’s really no need to hear it at all). Anyway, I “obtained” many an album through this “rent-a-CD” scam, dubbing them off for less than it would’ve cost to buy a cassette new. I used to rent an album a night (you could only do one at a time), Roland would acidly correcting me when I asked to “rent” something – “Issh nah rentihg!,” he’d chew around his tongue, “Issh pree-yooig!”
On a sidenote, that longhair worker and I developed a sort of record store friendship over time. He’s special order things for me, and even recommend new music to me based on what I bought and rented. In fact, he’s the one who first suggested I try out Pulp’s Different Class, which I now hold as one of my absolute favorite albums of the 90s. Kinda cool.
On another side note (the other side, perhaps), I can’t help but think now how a CD “rental” policy would translate for today’s teenagers. At the time, I was renting and dubbing CDs at the rate of one a day. Today’s kids would be renting and ripping or copying digitally, completely lossless. They could then make a torrent of their newly acquired album, and put it on the web almost instantly. I, on the other hand, had to actually purchase all that dubbed music again on compact disc later in life. Oh how times have changed…
Roland’s music store eventually went out of business. In fact, when it did, the guy who owned and operated the music store where I was working at the time bought a lot of his unsold stock. Oh, that’s right, we skipped that part, didn’t we? After graduating highschool, I took my love of the record store to a new level by actually seeking employment at one. I loved working at that store, and my impressive knowledge of music, for a guy of my age, helped make me a successful salesperson. Soon, I was “promoted” to the position of assistant manager. This meant nothing, really. A tiny raise, keys to the store, and being entrusted with counting the day’s take before recording it in the books and dropping it in the floor safe. Other than that it was just more headache: having to deal with upset customers and stupid merchandise return policies, and having to ruin peoples’ weekends by cold-calling them looking for someone to cover a slacker’s deserted shift. But man, I absolutely loved that job… headaches or no. I was around my people all the time, around the music. More than that, I could buy CDs at a buck over cost. I must’ve put half my paycheck right back into the boss’ pocket every single payday. He must’ve loved it. The job also came with “access.” If I wanted some rare Prodigy remix CD5 that was only released in limited quantities in the UK back in ’91, chances are I could page through one of the distributors’ books and put it on backorder. It sometimes never came, sometimes took months, but, more often than not, I’d score the illusive item.
This “access” turned out not to be limited to “legit” rare items, either… nope. One day, I was surprised to see a few CDs marked with neon pink “import” stickers mixed in with the regular stock. I say surprised, because, by then, I was entirely familiar with the kind of CDs mom-and-pop shops tag and sell as “imports.” Yup, bootlegs. Illicit disks that cost as much as a typical CD wholesale, likely due to the shady way they have to be mass-produced, shipped, and advertised, and retail for anywhere from $25 to $30 a pop. I asked the boss about it, and she replied that some guy had come into the store with a list of items he could get, and a trunkfull of items he had on-hand. She called the owner, and got the OK to do some speculative purchasing and see how they sold (the markup was good per disc, earning at least 200% on each, if not more). She took an empty box, accompanied the man to the parking lot, and took off his hands some discs she figured might sell, she also took a copy of his larger inventory list. I immediately asked to see the list, and was delighted to see several Beatles’ bootlegs I’d been after online, some of the original Yellow Dog releases that were already completely out of print. Finding a source like that for bootlegs, and at “cost” (well, his cost, at least), was like a dream come true to me.
I had a few truly enjoyable years in the employee of the record store… but then I had to move away from home and go to “real” college. Not long after, a new friend from my Circuits class introduced me to something called Napster, and, overnight, my love affair with the record store was over. Oh sure, I still enjoy walking into one, the least corporate the better, and perusing the stock. There’s some sort of magic charm those places have for me, I’m drawn to them even more than the traditionally-classic male retail pulls: home improvement, electronics, and books. I’ll always like record stores, I’m sure… it’s just that, for me, they’ve become quite obsolete. The internet is now my preferred music distribution channel. Because, obtained legally or otherwise, they’ve got the record store beat on price and stock.
That’s it. Have a good Monday. Goodnight.