Music and words

Madeira Botanical Garden, Funchal, November 2022

I've been grappling with decisions about playing music and podcasts and audiobooks. I listen to a lot of these, pretty much all the time, and the ways I've done it have changed with the times. If this doesn't interest you (and why should it?) I suggest you skip this post. It will be very boring.

Once upon a time I just had a HiFi system that played terrestrial radio stations, vinyl records, CDs and cassette tapes, and I borrowed books on tape. There was a radio in the kitchen, and a radio, CD player and cassette player in the car. All lovely and analogue (or what I'll call 'old-fashioned' digital in the case of CDs).

Next came iTunes and the iPod, which moved music onto the computer and made it more portable. I acquired a cassette-shaped gadget that let me play the iPod through the car radio, and a base station with a speaker in the kitchen. I loaded all my music CDs into iTunes, and Audible let me put my audiobooks on there too, so I could listen to music and books in the car, in the kitchen and on headphones. using just the iPod.

Things changed in the living room with the advent of universal WiFi. I fell heavily for Spotify and Google Chromecast, which fed WiFi into the back of the old amp in the living room so I could stream music as well as play the old records and CDs (the cassette player having long since given up the ghost). And the new networked television with sound bar has a Spotify app built in.

Then the amp started to fail - it was 40 years old, so I can't blame it. I replaced it with a super wireless-enabled amp that connects and coordinates new speakers in the kitchen and upstairs as well as the old speakers in the living room. I can still play CDs but the turntable and tuner aren't connected any more. At some point I'd really like to digitise a few special albums that aren't available elsewhere, but I am starting to accept the fact that it may never happen.

Things continue to change. Audible stopped being available for Windows so I couldn't load books onto my iPod any more. Then the ancient iPod started to get a little bit flaky in terms of battery life, and I had to find a new way of playing music and podcasts and books in the house and on the move, and I was forced to consider the phone replacing the iPod.

Audible has a phone app for the books, and then Spotify started to include podcasts and books as well as music within my subscription. So CDs and Spotify supply my music and podcast needs in the home, except for a couple of BBC podcasts that have to go through BBC Sounds. 

I was on an incredibly cheap but very stingy data plan for the phone, so I wasn't able to use Spotify in the car. I found a free podcast player (Player FM) that auto-downloads my unplayed episodes, but as a result of joining the U3A walkers I've been drawn into updating my phone data plan so I can use a phone-based satnav. The next stage might be to ditch Player FM and simplify things to just Spotify and the Audible phone app. I might need a new phone.

It's time to sell the iPod Classic. The end of an era.