Audiophile

So as you may well know, I'm all into music. It makes me happy. I speak the language. I can't get enough of it. A guy at work (who I noticed I had referred to as The Mixer at one point) called me a media mutt when it comes to what I listen to and watch because there are no limits with me. I will listen to and evaluate anything. New or old makes no difference. There is nothing before or after my time.

Right now, for example, I'm listening to Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, the first part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, his 15-16 hour epic opera cycle. Yeah, it's in German. Anyway...

I have the Amazon Cloud Player and for the first time since the iPod, I am able to organize a large amount of music, but unlike the iPod's 80Gb limitation, the Cloud has a limit of 250,000 songs, regardless of size. This is staggering. They do this by having space available for upload along with linking songs with their own download library so that some of the dongs are your own while others are those they've matched to theirs. Anyway, my count after all the burning and uploading that was to be done over a 3 week period tranferring everything from iPods, hard drives, and CDs came out to a little over 32K tracks. I cannot say songs because not everything is a song or even music, but tracks accurately describes it.

I believe the oldest pieces date back to the 1600's while I have stuff from 2012 as well. Haven't grabbed any 2013 stuff, cause the year is too new to know what's worth getting. That may seem like a lot and even raise an eyebrow, but I've been buying CDs and downloading from a variety of (legitimate) services since high school. I would blow hundreds of dollars when I was in the military buying entire artist catalogs on a whim (I specifically recall doing this with Billy Joel, Oingo Boingo, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Stephen Sondheim to name a few). If someone said "listen to this," I'd have the CD before going to bed. I went through hundreds of CDs in my garage determining what I had on my iPod and what I hadn't. And I was not alone either. The Queen listens to different genres of music than I frequent, so she had her own catalog of CDs to review and upload.

Now, I'm going through music I've not listened to in years simply because I never had room on my iPod for it. It was stored on CD, so that was enough. Now, it's accessible. In addition, because of how the cloud player works, anyone (in my family) can get what they want from the library and place it on their iPods to listen to. Whenever and wherever without waiting for me to plug in and find it for them.

Rock Girl was excited anyway.

For me, it means I can delete some things off my iPod that I've kept on there for storage and free up some space for music to actually listen to. This thing is going to completely change my iPod's purpose. It's very cool.