Napster, mp3's, and seeing the future.
How I moved all of my music to digital.
[IMAGE - Napster software program showing the downloading of shared files across the network]
“I believe that the digital revolution is merely just getting started. What we think we know now about the digital revolution is still very much in its infancy stages. We are analog humans trying desperately to adapt to the digital world. The knowledge is indeed there, if you want to learn it. However, it requires possessing an open mind. Sometimes, if you pay close attention, you might even see the future.” ~ Dave Garski
It was around Spring of 2000. I was teaching guitar lessons at the local music store. One afternoon one of my newer students, Jay, came in for his lesson. We started his lesson, and I began playing a riff on my guitar as he was getting his guitar out of its case. He said, "What's that?" I answered, "Oh, it's from a song called 'Nicole', from a band called Point Blank." I explained to him that I had just started playing bass guitar in a local band, and one of the lead singers was a girl named Nicole. The song had been playing in my head all week, even though I hadn't heard it in many years. Jay then said, "I could probably find it for you and burn it to a CD." I wasn't really sure what he was talking about, so I asked, "What do you mean find it?" he answered, "Yeah, I can probably find the song on Napster, download it and burn it to a CD for you." I still had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I sort of dismissed it and we started his lesson.
The following week, he came in for his lesson and handed me a CD. Written in big letters on the CD was "NICOLE". I asked, "What is this?" He answered, "I found that song, downloaded it, and converted it over to a wave file so you can play it on your CD player." I asked, "A what file?" He answered, "Wave, W-A-V. It's like a CD track, but not as big of a file size." My next question was, "You said that you found the song and downloaded it? From where?" He proceeded to tell me about this new file-sharing program called, "Napster". He then explained to me what an mp3 file was. We went to the back to the lesson room and I put the CD in my boombox. Sure enough, he found the song. I hadn't heard this song in so long, it was like visiting an old friend again. I thanked him for finding the song.
I went home after lessons and immediately got onto my computer. I had dial-up internet, so downloading this Napster program took a while. Once it was up and running, I was blown away by all of the songs, movies, and everything else that could be digitized - right there at my fingertips. I had free access to anything I wanted. You see, back then, people like me didn't really understand that this was stealing. I grew up making recordings of vinyl records onto cassette all my life. That was technically stealing too, but nobody ever made an issue out of it. To me, Napster was the digital version of the same idealistic thinking. I didn't go crazy. I couldn't. I didn't have enough room on my one gigabyte hard drive to download hundreds of songs. Instead, I downloaded one or two and then played them back and recorded them to a cassette tape. I think I still have that tape somewhere. The computer I had at the time was an old desktop H/P with Windows 95 and maybe 16 megabytes of RAM. I didn't really know much about computers back then. A one gigabyte hard drive was just enough to run the operating system and a few programs. Saving hundreds of songs onto that hard drive was just never going to happen.
Later that year, I got a brand new Gateway desktop computer. It had a much larger 250 gigabyte hard drive, and a faster processor. It also had a CD ROM drive. The only problem was - it was running one of the worst operating system Microsoft ever produced - The Windows Millennium Edition. Arguably, the most unstable O.S. ever made. The one good thing about this new O.S. was that it already had "Windows Media Player" already installed. Not only could you play your audio CD's on your computer you could also "Rip" them to mp3 files and store them onto the hard drive. It immediately occurred to me that I could "rip" all of the CD's in my collection onto my computer as mp3 files, and have everything stored conveniently in one place. I liked the idea of being able to listen to my music on my computer. So, I methodically and tediously began ripping every CD I owned, onto my computer. I then found out about this little annoying thing called "tagging". This is a sort of macro file that keeps all of the important information, like song title, artist, year, album, pictures, etc., all stored on the mp3. Now, Imagine having to do this to thousands of songs.
I had Napster installed on the new computer. By then, I realized that using Napster really was stealing. However, in my mind at the time, I thought "Well, I have all of these vinyl records that I’ve already paid for once. I think it's okay if I downloaded all of them, or as many as I could find, and have them stored onto my computer as well." I guess that at the time, this was justifiable in the simple fact that I didn't want to pay for my record albums twice. I had no way of digitizing my albums directly. Downloading my albums from Napster made sense to me. I wasn't selling these files. I was actually using them to teach guitar lessons. I bought a CD/mp3 boombox and brought it with me to my lessons. I eventually backed up all of the files onto burned CD's and brought some of them with me to my lessons. It was so much more convenient to have hundreds of albums on a few CD's than to carry a box filled with cassette tapes. It was a good thing I backed up all of those files onto CD's.
In the next few years, I had to learn a lot about the instability that comes with computers and hard drives. That new O.S. crashed on me so many times, I lost count. I must have reinstalled that operating system a dozen times, over the next few years. I then learned that I could buy a separate external hard drive with a lot more room, but it would cost me an arm and a leg to do so. Back then, the way you could gauge the cost of a new hard drive was to think in terms of “one gig equals one dollar”. So, if you wanted a 500 gigabyte hard drive, you had to spend at least $500.00. Terabyte hard drives weren't really even available then. So, I saved my money and bought a Western Digital 500 gigabyte external hard drive. I dumped everything onto it. I must have spent a thousand hours archiving everything perfectly. All the files were neatly marked, everything in its place. Then one day, it crashed. It wiped out everything. I spent days trying to recover it. It was dead. What a horrible, difficult lesson to learn.
In 2004, I purchased a brand new H/P desktop computer with Windows XP O.S. and a 750 gigabyte internal hard drive. This new computer was much faster and much more reliable. I eventually bought several external hard drives over the years. The last one was an H/P One Terabyte external that I purchased in 2009. 15 years later, it still works. I have since opted to buy wallet-size solid state usb hard drives. They are much faster and they don't require external power. I just plug them into the usb port of my computer, and the computer reads them automatically. Quite a huge leap in technology since those earlier days.
Over the past twenty-five years, I have slowly accumulated around 55,000 mp3's. The majority of these were from my own CD collection and from CD's I borrowed over the years. I used to make lots of mp3 CD's for my car. It was so much easier to carry a dozen CD's with a thousand full-length albums. It was ideal for the beach. I had my small portable boombox that played mp3 CD's. It was so much more convenient.
Smartphones
I was very late to the whole "smartphone" thing. I didn't understand the reason why everyone needed to keep in constant contact with each other via texting. I refused to participate, mostly out of ignorance. I had been using regular flip phones that you just made phone calls from. If someone needed to message me, they could email me just the same. This was my antiquated thinking in 2009. Nevertheless, people still tried to text me. I had a regular keypad on my phone, and it was not designed for texting. I eventually purchased a slide-phone that had an actual qwerty keyboard that made it easier to text, but I still didn’t have full internet access like a smartphone. I finally got my first smartphone in 2016. It was the Samsung Galaxy S4. It had a music player on it, but I didn't thinking that I needed to listen to songs on my cell phone. The speakers were too small, and you couldn’t hear the bass at all. In 2018, I upgraded and got a Samsung Galaxy S9+. This was an elite smartphone. I bought a 400 gigabyte Micro SD card and installed it on that phone. Well, 400 gigs is just enough room for my entire music collection. Fancy that!
In 2018, I was working a security job at the airport. Most of my shift, I kept my phone in my shirt pocket and played music on it all day. This made perfect sense to me. I have all of my music, my entire collection on my cell phone. All the music I want to listen to is in my pocket. If I have upwards of 40-50 thousand songs to listen to, why would I need anymore? Imagine how many people have asked me which music streaming service I was listening to. When I tell them that the music is on my phone, they don't really understand. The very idea that I actually took the time to organize and archive tens of thousands of songs and put them on a miniature memory card and installed it inside my phone, made little or no sense to them. I guess that I could say the same thing about people who pay to listen to online streaming services and satellite radio. That makes absolutely no sense to me at all. You see, the difference is - I took the time to archive everything I've ever had, and put it onto a small chip that fits neatly inside my phone. This was not the original plan - seeing as how, I started doing this nearly 25 years ago. Smartphones didn't even exist back then.
I have since upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. This phone does not have a slot for a micro sd card, so I had to copy all of the files from the S9+ over to the new phone. This is what I use as my daily music device. I love the idea that I can make my own playlists on my phone and listen to anything I want, anytime I want, and it doesn't cost me a penny. Meanwhile, my CD's and my vinyls collect dust. I purchased a portable JBL Bluetooth 20 watt speaker a couple of years ago. I original got it so I could listen to it instead of the tiny speakers on my phone. It works great at the beach and at guitar lessons.
I haven't quite figured out all of the reasons why today's music doesn't interest me very much. I like some stuff, but mostly I miss rock guitars and real drummers. I miss listening to good music played by real musicians. They're out there. They just haven't been discovered - and unfortunately, I doubt they ever will. So, I listen to my music. I listen to the soundtracks to my life. I wish they would have had this technology thirty or forty years ago. I'm am still blown away by the simple fact that I can take all of my music collection with me where ever I go. Pretty damned cool!
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