{"id":3123,"date":"2005-09-11T14:16:52","date_gmt":"2005-09-11T18:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/09\/11\/3123.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:04","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:04","slug":"portable-digital-plausible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/09\/11\/portable-digital-plausible\/","title":{"rendered":"portable, digital, plausible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The always interesting Clive Thompson has a bee in his proverbial about the iPod. Which is OK. The latest thing he addresses is the latest research on how people use their portable digital music players<\/a>. The research (by Solutions Research Group<\/a>) indicates that most people who have digital music players don’t put very much music on them. The average, evidently, is 375 songs.\n

Mr. Thompson finds this a confirmation of his idea that iPods are essentially presentational, that is, that people don’t need iPods for their function, but for what having an iPod says about you. I don’t necessarily agree, but it is clearly true that a lot of people—probably most people—are willing to pay extra for more memory and then leave that memory empty. Apple takes advantage of that. I don’t know that the extra memory necessarily<\/I> has to do with showing the white earbuds, or hanging the Shuffle around your neck outside your overclothes whilst jogging. But there it is. I would point out that iPods, according to the survey, tend to have more music on them than their competitors do, but only to an average of 500 songs or so. The numbers that SRG made available on the web are pretty minimal, and don’t tell me anything about outliers at all. That is, of the people who want to put 2,000 songs on their portable digital music players, how many have iPods? Of the people who put less than 50 songs, how many chose some cheaper, smaller alternative? Are there more iPods with more than 5,000 songs than there are with 1,000 to 4,999? That is, are most people small-numbers, with another large group of big-numbers, but very few in-betweens? I have no idea.\n

Anyway, I don’t own a portable digital music player, myself. I made the switch from CDs to the hard drive a few years ago, and I really like it. My current library is 8,800 songs. My usual listening is a shuffle that draws from 5,772 songs (at the moment) out of 7,268 that I’ve called Rock, Jazz or Klezmer, but various restrictions trim that list down to a trifle over 1,000 (but that changes frequently, depending mostly on how much I’ve been listening lately). I suspect that if I had an iPod or its near equivalent, I would just port those thousand tunes, but I might well decide to move the whole 5,772, if it didn’t interfere with the thing working properly.\n

But then, I can’t quite figure out why I want an iPod (or something like it). I spend most of my time either at a computer, in which case an iPod is clearly second-best, or with friends or family or acquaintances, in which case I wouldn’t have the earphones in anyway. The times I use my portable CD player are when I am going for a Walk for Exercise, which doesn’t happen as much as it might, and which takes about an hour anyway. I don’t come up against the limitations of the CD player, except I suppose if I bump it around too much. If I want to, I can make myself a mix CD, very nearly as easily as I can make myself a playlist, or I can listen to one of the hundreds of discs I have in the rack.\n

There is the car. If I had to drive a lot (and thank the Lord and my Best Reader that I haven’t had to drive a lot), I could imagine the benefit of having an iPod-like-device in my dashboard. I understand that there are devices which allow you to play the iPod through the car, and I suppose I could just leave it hooked up like that, but it seems gimmicky. I’d rather just have a little USB connecting device for my external hard drive or my laptop or some such. Anyway, something like that would work just fine. But, as I said, I don’t need it at present, and with any luck, by the time I do need it, they will have invented something better.\n

I listen to music a lot. I mean, a lot. I hate silence; silence makes me tetchy. So I almost always have music on in the house. If I’m in the house a lot (and I am these days), I have music playing all day, and I like that. But as far as the portable digital music player goes, the question isn’t when<\/I> I listen to music, or how many<\/I> songs I listen to, but where<\/I> I listen to music, and who<\/I> I’m with when I listen. What I imagine a portable would be really good for would be gardening, if one liked to garden. Or a longish commute on public transportation, although I did that once upon a time, and didn’t really like to have the earphones in.\n

Just to ramble for a moment longer, my current playlist is a party shuffle out of (1) those songs I have rated 3, haven’t listened to in the last four weeks, and haven’t listened to more than a total of n<\/i> times (through the player), where is currently equal to 2; (III) those songs I have rated 4 and haven’t listened to in the last week; and (3) those songs I have rated 5, haven’t listened to in the last day, and haven’t listened to more than n<\/I> times, where n<\/I> is currently 8. The reason for the variable n<\/I> is that it assures me that I will listen to pretty much all my 3s eventually and won’t go more than a month or so without hearing each and every one of my ninety-six 5s. Of course, getting a portable device would screw this up, unless I bothered to calibrate the last-played and playcounts every day or two (which I assume one can do).\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The always interesting Clive Thompson has a bee in his proverbial about the iPod. Which is OK. The latest thing he addresses is the latest research on how people use their portable digital music players. The research (by Solutions Research…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-music-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17518,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3123\/revisions\/17518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}