there's a tiny city in my mp3 player
My first music player was a prism-shaped iRiver that held 128MB of audio, minus the usual room for FAT32 formatting and firmware updates. It was barely enough to hold about 2-3 albums at a low bitrate, (transferred at USB 1.0 speed), or about 1 album and 1 podcast. Iβve had it for more than two decades, and it still works and sounds great--and this is because it runs on a replaceable AA battery.
It will probably work forever, and it comes from an era when electronics were still designed to last as long as possible.
128MB is very crowded space, and no amount of compression tricks can make up for that. For a long time, it was more of a companion to my MiniDisc player, but it was still a slim, light alternative, well-suited for a pocket and the hike uphill from BART to my university classes.
For a long time I craved a 1GB player, far beyond my budget. It would hold a dozen or more albums, and felt like it would be big enough for music to become lost, then found again later, like digging up treasure.
Eventually my girlfriend showed mercy and bought me an extravagant $200 iPod Mini, a cavernous 4GB. It held a huge volume of music, a new form of radio show called a βpodcast,β played Klondike solitaire, and was a smooth, confident Apple product. And, the heavy, buggy, and excessively styled iTunes application, which tracked plays on the device, could dynamically add and remove tracks without direct intervention. What I had was no longer a drip feed from my music library, but a personal radio station whose rotation changed as often as I was able to connect it to my home PC.
The MP3 player, or digital audio player, died maybe five or six years after the smartphone and cheaper wireless internet appeared. Soon came online services that alleviated the average person the burden of collecting, storing, and managing digital files at all. A golden age began for these people.
But I still had a collection of music files going back around 20 years, physical CDs that went back farther, and a broke personβs habit of fitting much stuff into a tiny space.
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Even with the half-dozen or so cast-off smartphones Iβve inherited since, Iβve always preferred a standalone audio player. Itβs light, single-minded in its purpose, and is neither dependent on an ad-supported streaming scheme, nor does it creepily surveil my βlistening habits.β Of course, such a device also justifies the 20+ year music collection I maintain as though time stopped in 2003.
So maybe itβs the inertia of years of scraping together a few bucks to buy a CD and something to play it on, and the weight of a collection that almost no one bothers with anymore (and why, when music can be plucked freely from the air?). Maybe itβs having the Walkman era impressed upon my brain at a child (theyβre still so dang cool). But my current ability to carry more than 7500 tracks with me everywhere I go feels like an incredible luxury, at the same time an arcane secret, at the same time a tiny private city Iβve built over the last couple decades that has been slowly growing in every direction, reaching backward in time like the tail of a comet. Thereβs digging through my own musical nostalgia of course, but also the excavation of other musical histories, finding them new and fresh, or finally being able to hear whole albums from artists that only had a hit or two played on the radio. All that, sitting neatly on the little shelves in a device in my pocket, available, right now, and not on some server somewhere.
My first player held 128MB. My current one holds 64GB, a modest volume today, with a little backpack of a TF card giving it a 32GB bump. 4GB was once enough for a radio station. This is enough to be a garden, a city, a prepperβs bag of emergency supplies, a bookstore, a museum. The main drive of 64GB is for a curated collection of mostly music, and it bumps at the edges, requiring periodic pruning as my personal canon shifts and mutates. The 32GB card holds mostly podcasts, but also spoken word and non-music items of interest, like ambient sounds and meditations.
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When my dad died, one item left behind was his iPod Nano. I didnβt want it; I have enough gizmos, and the device, like all Apple products, felt more of itself and its brand than something someone could own and put to use, change and be changed by, like a good knife or an old sweater. But I made sure to locate the old manβs laptop, plug the iPod in, and sync it with iTunes. This is because iTunes was once designed to be useful software, and it had some βpower userβ features that hadnβt been cut or atrophied yet--in this case, the ability to export the userβs entire listening history as a detailed HTML-formatted list. And so I was able to extract a mirror image of a portion of my fatherβs soul over the previous year. I made copies of his small digital music collection and that list, and distributed it to my mourning siblings.
As an aside, if he had died later, and used a modern device, I probably would not have had access to this part of his life in the same way, or at all. Simultaneously, the cohort listening on the other side of a modern device would have had access to much, much more, their surveillance silent and opaque to the man or his son.
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An mp3 player is a personal device. A phone is not--at least, not in the same way. The choice to load music onto a player is a deliberate act, an act of planning for the future, and a quiet personal statement to oneβs self. It is a tiny concert hall for one person, and a shield when the world grates.
I could map out the city in my pocket for you, but you could probably guess: This folder of audiobooks, thatβs the library. The glow of electric color several streets over, those are the video game soundtracks. A school bus rumbles by, blaring the grunge music of my teens that I can still bear to listen to. And this is dull stuff to you, because itβs a place thatβs only of interest to me.
The territory sketched onto this device is entirely mine, and is completely private. It changes only when I change it. It never wriggles out of my grasp, bothers me with irrelevancies, interrupts itself with ads, or demands a toll. Its dimensions are small enough to almost be forgotten on my person. Yet, unlike cloud storage or streaming, its contents are somewhere, knowable and reliable. It is a pocket filled with familiar objects, and some lint. It is a little nest, a dead end street on the other side of town, and I require nothing further from it. It is a container, a carrier-bag, and I fill it myself.