CatSpit

After a long day at work last week I was so pissed off upon arriving home that Kim promptly put a stiff drink in my hand and took me to the mall to buy that iPod touch I’d been pondering over for far too long to cheer me up. My dilemma has been the standard iPhone versus iPod touch. Data plan monthly or more up front cost. Reduced number of devices or more storage?

Given that I already had an old nano for the gym [yes, it's still going, Chris!] I was freed from that worry even though the new nano’s are pretty dope. When forced with the snap decision I decided that I won’t go for the iPhone until they come out with a 64gb version in future years which gives my collection some room to grow. Until then I have managed to squeak all of my music collection into the 32GB touch. Just. Really they should call it the 29.5 GB version as the system files seem to take up an awful lot of space.

Upon arriving home, the set up couldn’t have been easier as for once I could just ‘synch all’ and I was up half the night fiddling with the wireless applications and downloading music right to the touch from bed while Kim snoozed fitfully next to me. The user interface has been reviewed a billion times so I won’t rehash all of that here, but I did find it a compelling experience. The Mac OS in general is just a nice place to spend your time and I was happy to find the iPod touch no exception. The form factor of the iPod is also lovely – notably thinner than the iPhone but with the same ‘just-enough’ heft and curves. My greasy fingers made short work of the touch screen, though.

Initially I was pretty convinced that all of this finger-pokey stuff was gimmick, but the myth quickly exploded after my first two hours of use. The implementation is really quite brilliant, and the UI is just so satisfying to use. I even managed to make my peace pretty quickly with typing on a touch sensitive keypad which I had hated when trying to text message on a friends’ iPhone. Again, the smartness of the predictive text lets you get away with a lot and the software makes you look awesome. I’ll never be able to match Adam’s left-thumb-only typing frenzy, but I’ll manage just fine in the interim.

I really, really, REALLY wanted the $250 set of Shure 310′s but even though I love my music I cannot justify a $250 set of earphones for these abused auditory canals. After about 20 minutes internal waffling, some package scrutinising and much cursing sotto voice, I managed to talk myself down to a $150 set of black Shure 210′s. If you believe Fabian [strange fellow], these clearly won’t be as good as the generic set that come free with the iPod.

Given that my priorities were reasonable musical presence, a good sound stage, clear / true bass without booming and a comfortable in-ear seal that reduces external noise, the 210′s seemed about right. After 3 days of use, I am very happy with the earphones, but not happy with most of my music being sampled at 128kbps. With cheap earphones, you can’t tell any difference with the massive compression but what quickly becomes apparent with a very nice set of cans is that your music collection sounds like it’s being played under a blanket of mud and cotton wool by Mr Fluffy and his Fluffies. Frankly the thought of re-ripping all of those CD’s at 160 or higher gives me the jitters, so I’ll settle for grandfathering in new music at the higher bitrate. In my last post’s comments we have also established pretty clearly that my friends have 20x better hearing than I do for which I can only blame Iron Maiden.

Overall I am tickled pink with my new acquaintances and want to carry them everywhere with me. I will post back when I have had the chance to listen to some decently produced music without encoding through the earphones.

It was only a few years of pointless arguing later that the spoiled brat fight between Apple and the music labels finally ended with agreement on a scheme that would deliver DRM-free music to all of us via iTunes. So byebye, CD’s. It’s been real.

I still remember the very first CD I bought, the excitement of scraping away futilely at the shrink-wrap [what's this shiny stuff? blimey it's hard to get off] from Killing Joke’s Millenium EP and then playing it about 5 zillion times.

Each play sounded as good as the last! I marvelled at the sound quality on my tiny little speakers and the fact the tape never got stuck in the player! No more tape to tape dubbing for me, oh no sir! No more ‘Chromium Dioxide’ or, if you were feeling flush, the elusive ‘Metal’ tape. I was so thrilled with the thought of never having to tease out tape birds-nests-oh-so-gently and then slowly wind back onto the casette with a pencil again!

Of course, with this advance of technology the art of the mixtape was lost forever and the romantic side of me will always feel slightly melancholy about that. I somehow miss the extra work which went into those. It’s the x-factor, the love, the thought, the care that evolves what is otherwise just a collection of songs into an insight into someone’s soul. They always sounded like shit but that wasn’t the point, was it?

Most people these days don’t know what the fuck a quality mix is, let alone the requisite late nights that should be spent planning the perfect solution. the ideal song selection and the right mood transition for the right person. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby immediately. I’ll even let you off lightly by allowing you to watch the unexpectedly good film instead if you want.

Kim and I must have burned an entire field of beehives in candles with the late nights we spent meticulously recording songs for each other when the Atlantic separated us and we’d not see each other for half a year at a time. This along with a forest of handwritten letters, another lost art but that’s one Kim’s probably thankful for as my writing may quite possibly be the worst scrawl that ever did infect this planet. That was back in 1990, fast forward to 2009. First off, damn that was 19 years ago and I feel .. damn. That’s a long time. Wow. ..

Damn it.

[musical interlude]

Fast forward to 2009 and I think its safe to say that the CD just died. DRM and Quality/Bitrate were the last two barriers to breakout sales for Apple/iTunes and now they have been removed I don’t see why anyone would buy a CD. For the price of a few CD’s you can get an iPod classic which stores more music than you can shake a stick at. In addition, I bet only highly trained professionals could tell the difference between a 256 bitrate AAC file and a CD. I know I can’t.

Of course, the gamble / strategy part in all of this is that a good chunk of people are going to buy the higher quality music which takes up more hard disk space. Hence people are going to need, rather than want, the latest iPhone and iPod touch models that go beyond 32GB when they come out. Admittedly this won’t be everyone, but I don’t think anyone would argue that it will be more than would otherwise. Brilliant, really.

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple(R) today announced several changes to the iTunes(R) Store (http://www.itunes.com). Beginning today, all four major music labels — Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI, along with thousands of independent labels, are now offering their music in iTunes Plus, Apple’s DRM-free format with higher-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings. iTunes customers can also choose to download their favorite songs from the world’s largest music catalog directly onto their iPhone(TM) 3G over their 3G network just as they do with Wi-Fi today, for the same price as downloading to their computer. And beginning in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29, with most albums still priced at $9.99.