6 January 2013 - 148.3 GB Ain't Enough To Satisfy Me

I’m woken up by Lady licking my chest at 6.30.  Grumpily I get up, dress, grab my iPod, Lady’s leash, Lady and we’re out the door.  I scroll through the iPod to find something to play…..and find nothing I want to hear.  By the time I get to the park to set Lady free, I’ve already decided to walk in silence.  For some reason, I don’t remove the earphones; putting it into my pocket with the iPod will tangle it and I hate undoing it.  I try to sing Camper Van Beethoven’s Eye Of Fatima Pt. 1 in my mind but even before I finish, I’m cursing the good people at Apple.  My beef?  Why don’t they make a bigger iPod?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPod Classic.  I’ve owned one now for three and a half years and only had to retire the first one in November last year with Apple’s replacement program minimising the financial pain.  I love that I can carry most of my favourite albums with me.   If I get an urge to play something, chances are that it will be there.  Even better is the ability to play friends stuff that rocks your boat.  I like to think that there have been a number of instances when people I know have bought albums based on such sampling.  On trips overseas, it is a godsend.  During the 90’s I had embarked upon two 3 month backpacking odysseys.  In those days I carried a Walkman and was mightily pleased to have found these two cassette velcro wrap arounds that allowed me to store 6 cassettes each.  Counting the cassette in the Walkman I could carry a total of 13 ninety minute tapes for very little space.  (Even today, I can still recite most of what I took on those trips and how I wouldn’t play these for months afterwards.)  My iPod can carry more than 100 times that number.

But it took a long time to be converted though, the decisive feature being the shuffle function.  Using that is akin to listening to my very own radio station with the tracks being “programmed” by an electronic program manager. (Just like, I’m led to believe, some US radio stations.)  This ultimately triumphed over my greatest concern, that approximately 148 GB is simply not enough.

As I walk, I wonder exactly whether the people of Apple understand this.  Have they ever heard of the phrase “Record Collector”? Does their market research REALLY tell them the impact of digital music has resulted in people collecting less music rather than more?  Do they REALLY think with the proliferation of Collectors Editions, Deluxe Editions, 10^th 20^th, 30^th and 40^th Anniversary editions, box sets, new releases with bonus discs, digital releases of albums that have never previously been released on CD, etc, that there is not a significant number of consumers out there that want to possess an increasing number of physical music media items that they might conceivably want to put on their iPods?  Surely there are enough people like me out there who feel the same and, like me, had or are still put off buying their first digital music player because 148 GB is simply not big enough?  And another thing. Why among the approximately 12 GB added to the storage space to create the “160 GB” iPod Classic, have they provided us with things like games, contact lists, storage for photographs (other than music artwork), etc that we have absolutely no use?  Put logically, if someone wants to buy 160 GB to store music, surely that person would have no other interest in the device than storing/listening to music?

Unsatisfied by my musing, I get home, have breakfast with “M” and go upstairs.   I’m determined to listen to something and resort to my pending crate.  This is where I keep my purchases before I get around to playing them a first time and decide whether to add it to the iPod. I rummage around and find:

Wilco – The Whole Love

This is their most recent album that was released last year to a fairly muted reception.  I had been underwhelmed by their two most recent releases (Wilco The Album and, especially, Sky Blue Sky) but I’ve always wondered whether this was an unfair judgement given that that they’re in the same catalogue as Being There, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born.
The first sounds heard are electronic sounds.  Aah!  A return to experimentation of Ghost. The second track has a cheesy farfisa organ running through it, reminding me of a new wave number.  The following track has psychedelic overtones, the next sounds like a classic unreleased George Harrison number and so on and it is only on the next track that we have something vaguely resembling country.  The album continues on in this vein, revealing many of the bands influences and heroes or, dare I say it, the whole love.

Verdict: It’s going on the iPod.