It’s Sunday, and if I had an ounce of sense, which I will be the first to admit I do not, I would have spent the day chilling out, maybe going to Tescos, and possibly slipping quietly into a pleasant coma in front of the TV. But, being stupid, I didn’t. I intended to spend the day working so that I can have a guilt-free Tuesday afternoon off to go up to London and acknowledge (you don’t really ‘celebrate’ much after 31) my birthday.
In actual fact, I spent an enjoyable several hours trying to help a friend of mine figure out how to get Soulseek working properly on a Mac. Trouble is, there’s a bit of a communications hitch in trying to give a Maccite advice when you are, however unwillingly, a PCite:
‘Ok, so now you right-click on the user’s name… What do you mean you only have one button on your mouse?’
Eventually, I got to see a screenshot of said Mac version of the Slsk user interface. And promptly gave up. Even someone of my prodigious assumption-making abilities can’t fathom a program from one screenshot alone. I did try to find a Mac Slsk faq online to assist in the fathoming process, but they all seemed to be in German.
Other displacement activities indulged in today included burning CDs of mp3s for various friends of mine to whom I have promised an insight into my musical taste. (More fool them for accepting.) Now, this whole mp3 thing is great, imo. I get to road test music before I buy it, hell, sometimes before it even comes out.
As the season for new releases descends swiftly upon us, I have found that I will not be purchasing The White Stripes’ Elephant, no matter how hard they hype it, but I shall be buying Blur’s Think Tank, despite the fact that I was fully prepared to hate everything they ever released ever again after they fired Graham Coxon.
I am also now desperate to find the money to buy Tom McRae’s Just Like Blood, Athlete’s Vehicles and Animals, Hot Hot Heat’s Make Up The Breakdown, The Dandy’s Warhols’ Welcome to the Monkey House, Turin Brakes’ Ether Song, and several rather marvellous recordings by bands/artists who will never get airplay on XFM (Jeff Hanson, Joseph Arthur, The Shins) but who were justly recommended to me by friends.
[Hint: if you haven’t bought me something for my birthday yet, please refer to the above list.]
If you were to believe the music industry (although why would you believe an industry willing to sell its granny into slavery for a quick buck?) you would assume that having downloaded these mp3s, I’m now happy with my music and will never again spend a single penny on tangible musical assets.
How wrong can you be? Maybe it’s because I’m an Aries, but I have to own the things I like. I don’t like renting movies if I can buy the DVD instead.
[Second birthday hint: Stargate Ultimate, My Own Private Idaho, Donnie Darko, Shawshank Redemption, The Crow… I could go on, but that’s enough for the moment.]
Instead of being the happy punter whose pfenigs are safe in her purse, the ability to download mp3s has resulted in me craving the ownership of these CDs in roughly the same way that I’m currently craving Thornton’s Champagne Truffles now that I’ve given up caffeine again (although that’s another story).
I certainly don’t think that an mp3 is in any way a satisfactory replacement for the CD. For a start, you can’t look at the pretty pictures in the booklet. Secondly, the sound of an mp3 can sometimes be, well, shit. Thirdly, I like the idea that my purchase in some small way contributes to the hedonistic lifestyle of some band through whom I can live vicariously, although I suspect that you can’t buy much coke with 7p.
But finally, this whole burning a CD of your mp3s thing is utterly over-hyped. The CDs fail to burn properly resulting in the wasting of many blanks. Some mp3s that played perfectly well on your computer turn out to be so full of pops and clicks when you play them on your stereo that they become unlistenable (and result in the throwing away of yet another CD). And the mp3s that aren’t poppy or clicky sound like they’ve been recorded under a duvet.
Nah, mp3s will never kill off CDs. That’s the job of the money-grabbing capitalist pig record labels who pass off piles of grossly over-priced shite as ‘product’ and hope that the record-buying public is too stupid to notice.
Oh, btw, I did get some work done. Eventually.
