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"Listening With Purpose"

Posted: 28 March, 2021

Like a lot of people, my partner and I have been working from home for a year. Because of the nature of her work, her discussions with patients and co-workers must remain confidential, which means I'm pretty much forced to wear headphones, 24-7. Smol house is smol. It's not been too much of a problem. Between Spotify and various podcasts, it's easy to fill my ears with something, but I feel my relationship with music has subtly changed because of it, and not for the better.

Being a DJ -- even if only a bedroom one, of late -- I've always bought music, and I continue to spend a reasonably amount each month at Beatport, but Spotify has seriously reduced the number of artists I've supported directly through album purchases. Between lockdown and Brexit, a lot of my favourites are now publicly struggling, so I've started to make a conscious effort to cruise Bandcamp, or buy releases directly, in a bid to help. I like their work. It makes my life better. I would have bought it in the times-before-streaming, so it seems remiss not to support them now they and their crews actually need it.

Spotify's also changed the way I select music. Instead of carefully curating a few hours' worth to fit my mood, I'm letting playlists roll into the Spotify-magic-select-o-tron, which in turn tends to lead to me zoning out from it completely.

I don't like the fact that I'm paying less and less attention, and I can't remember the last time I put an album [or a mix] on, just to listen to it, and I think it's time for a change... So, this week I pulled out my old iPods and tried to kick them back into life.

I've probably not used an iPod on a daily basis since 2013. Back then I had one in my car (filled with tracks I'd bought to mix with) and one in the office (filled with a wider selection of artists and albums to cover more 'moods'). For this experiment I went a little further back and found my 5th gen, the iPod Video, from 2005.

The 5th gen has a reputation, rightly or wrongly, for having the best DAC of the iPod range, so I was curious to see if it still worked and how it sounded. Amazingly, not only does it all appear to be completely fine, but the battery is also holding a charge.

Firing up an old iPod is an interesting experience. It's a literal time-capsule. In my case, from a time before I started organising my music by playlist. In fact, back to a time where a lot of it doesn't even seem to be that well tagged.

There're the usual suspects -- classics that I always return to -- but also an interesting range of DJs and genres that I no longer seem to follow. It was quite a lot of fun scrolling through, trying to remember why certain things made the cut. I wonder if I would have changed the selection had I known that future me would be looking at it, more than a decade later?

Syncing music is an issue because I'm no longer on the Mac day-to-day. iTunes on windows is hot garbage (and wouldn't work with this iPod anyway, because it's mac formatted), and Foobars iPod sync leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, every music app Ive tried on Windows so far has been appalling! Admittedly, I have specific needs because of the size of my library, but it's shocking that this isn't a solved problem.

So that's the next job, decide how I'm going to get music over to this little thing, and ensure that, for the next few weeks at least, I'm listening with purpose...

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