Newsletter 60 – April 12, 2024
Hi,
In several of my blog posts and newsletters over the years I have mentioned how music is such an important part of my life, and about how I have used it while I write. The truth is that I don’t use it as a writing tool very often these days. I did write to various kinds of music in the distant past, mostly to set a mood when I wrote. It was almost always instrumental, often classical or film scores. Just something to provide a background mood similar to the scene I was writing at the time. Eventually I came to know the music so well that I started focusing more on it than on the scene (anticipating the swell of the orchestra or an upcoming rhythm change, for example), so I stopped using it. The only time I’ve used it recently while writing was when I was in an extremely noisy environment, like people talking loudly at a coffee shop or restaurant, or during November NaNoWriMo write-in sessions. Under those circumstances its purpose was just to create a sound wall to block out the conversations around me. I recently realized, though, that my music (and my Chevy Bolt) also led to one of those interruptions I found so disruptive to my progress last year. Here’s what happened.
I’ve acquired a lot of music over the years. As far back as the 1960’s I started buying albums and singles from my favorite bands. It was always on vinyl (which was all they had then). Eventually those gave way to eight track tapes and cassettes, then I later replaced many of those with CDs, which I listened to on my Discman (anyone remember those?), and then converted some of those CDs to MP3s so I could listen to them on my Rio Player (remember those?). Then the Rio Player was replaced by an iPod nano. A few years ago I loaded up my cell phone’s MicroSD card with MP3s. Eventually I had over 200 GB of music files (acquired over the last twenty years or so) on my phone and my computers.
Playing music in automobiles followed the same progression. The very first car I owned only had a radio, so I had to listen to whatever the local stations fed me. I was always conscious of that, so when I became a DJ (mid-1960s) I tried to play the best music possible for my listeners, but the beauty of having a music player in your own car was that you could take your music with you. You didn’t have to depend on the DJ to (maybe, hopefully) play that song you really wanted to hear. Those eight-tracks and then cassette players (in addition to the radio) became the norm, until CD players took center stage, but Evie, my Chevy Bolt, didn’t even have a CD player. The last car we bought before Evie, Minay’s 2015 Prius c (Tibby), had a radio and a CD player (which could also play MP3s that had been burned to a CD), but Evie just had an “infotainment” system. No CD player.
The infotainment system, it seems to me, was designed to get the driver to subscribe to yet another streaming service (like Sirius XM radio, or Apple Play). I quickly found out, though, that it could play music files from my phone through a Bluetooth or USB connection, or from flash drives, so I copied a few of my favorite songs from my computer to a flash drive to test it out. I wasn’t happy with the sound quality at all. A lot of my music files had bitrates as low as 120 kbps. Those were mostly songs I had downloaded from online services like iTunes, and they sounded “okay” over earbuds, but that wouldn’t do for long trips. I decided to revamp my music collection. First, I deleted every song from my computer that was saved at less than 320 kbps (unless it was something I just couldn’t bear to part with). Also, if any of the remaining files were part of my CD collection, I reburned new copies (from the original CDs) as 1536 kbps WAV files (which are near-CD quality), and replaced the old MP3s with the new WAV files. I found out that Evie would play the WAV files but wouldn’t identify the song. I had to use a metadata tag editor to embed that information for each WAV file before the Bolt’s infotainment system would recognize the data. I had lots of files, and it was very time consuming. Without that information attached to each file I couldn’t search the infotainment system for individual song titles or albums. Now, though, I can navigate to whatever album or song I want to listen to. The size of the music folder on my computer reduced a lot after the first cull of really low quality MP3s, but then expanded considerably when I started trading the 320 kbps MP3s for the even higher-bitrate WAVs. The difference in the sound quality was remarkable, though.
For nearly three months (from 11-14-2023 to 2-6-2024) I couldn’t drive Evie anyway, because I wasn’t allowed to bend my left leg until the broken kneecap had healed, but now that I’m free of the torture device (the knee immobilizer) I can drive again. I have the best songs in my collection stored on about ten flash drives as high-quality MP3s and WAVs (one flash drive for my favorite individual songs, another one just for classical, one for blues and reggae, one for all of The Beatles’ albums, one for rock, one for jazz, one for podcasts, etc.). The next time I go on the road I’m all set, but it did take me way too long to do the fresh burn to WAV files from all of those CDs, and tagging each song. I need to do better at managing my time, but at least it’s another distraction I can put behind me.
The next newsletter is about mowing season. Yuck.
See you then,
Michael
[Musick is the thing of the world that I love most,”
from Samuel Pepys’ Diary,
Volume Seven, July 30, 1666, just 34 days
before the Great Fire of London started.]
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