The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Tunes, a Hard Drive and (Just Maybe) a Brain:
“Everyone was rocking out,” Mr. Angus said. “Then Elton comes on and kills it – it was like strike No. 1 against my manhood.”
I have been playing with Shuffle mode on my ‘Pod since I read this last week: it has brought up some interesting juxtapositions. I guess I am surprised that people don’t know what it means to have everything in their collection potentially cued up to play. Still more surprising is how long it takes to learn from one’s mistakes:
Once when [Angus] and his girlfriend were together in his bedroom, he said, his iPod started blasting the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”
“I jumped out of bed as fast as I could,” he recalled. “But it had already wrecked the mood.” In the future, he said, he will try not to let his iPod run wild.
Mine is stocked with 1,523 tracks, on 156 albums, in 22 genres by 86 artists. So there’s a chance for some real taste collisions. But I haven’t anything really disastrous: worst case, something comes up that I have heard too recently and I fast forward past it.
What I have learned from this is that the iPod != the Walkman. The Walkman and its imitators, even today’s flash-memory-based players, let you carry some music around, but you had to think about what you wanted. Your study tunes might not be your workout tunes which might not be your make-out tunes. The iPod lets you out of the choice: given enough disk space, you take it all with you. I’m getting close to have to decide what will stay on the iPod and what will remain at home, but even then, I doubt I’ll ever find myself with nothing to listen to.