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March 30, 2010 - 10:15am
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Computer changing the way you listen?
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Definitely not here; I am still resolutely in 'album' mode.
The principal reason for this is without doubt the variety of music I now have on the server. First, my own music covers a fair range of genres from classical thru jazz to rock. Second, I also have most of THE BOSS's discs ripped, covering rock genres mostly absent from my own collection (she finds it amusing that after 15 years her discs still have a shelf all their own, and sees it as a form of musical apartheid). Now, more recently the microvandals have started asking me to rip their discs (everything from nursery rhymes and audiobooks to Eurovision-style pop), which has the advantage that I can decide when the music gets turned off at bedtime simply by confiscating the remote* so I don't fight it.
So if I put my system on shuffle I am treated to a veritable m
Squeezebox Server will do 'Shuffle within Genre' but after three years or so of exclusive server delivered music I still fall into album mode.
Guess my idea of shuffle is streaming web radio. Fresh selections with metedata on a display exposes me to so much undiscovered music and creates those future album purchases and plays.
My micro vandals are listening to the Beatles to improve their Rockband scores, so I have lucked out so far!
But concerning the shuffle stuff, take last night.
I started out with The Long Honeymoon by Elvis Costello, then Just The Way You Are by Billy Joel, Coolsville live Rickie Lee Jones, some dB's, k.d. lang,Trip Shakespeare, Chris Stamey, etc etc.
All were pleasant and great, well the Rickie Lee Jones track was a bit dramatic and intense for before bed, but not jarring enoug for me to skip it. The thing is, I am not sure I am happy listening this way so much! It is more of an intellectual unease, noting this large shift in my listening and realizing that it just happened.
I am going to try more album oriented listening for awhile and see what I think. But it will be weird to go back to the kind of listening I did for 41 years, and that is hard to wrap my head around.
Trey
I have never enjoyed shuffle play. I listen deliberately, not randomly as background.
Classical music does not lend itself to random play; bleeding chunks out of context are jarring at best.
Even good pop recordings have a rhythm and flow to them that is disturbed by random play. Well produced albums contain thoughtfully ordered tracks separated by deliberately chosen periods of silence.
Elk, I listen deliberately as well. Deliberately in terms of really listening to the tune. I have been embracing chaos in terms of which tune I listen to, but I am not talking about background music.
Now sometimes I will just shuffle an artist. I did that recently with Warren Zevon, XTC, Johnny Cash, and Kate Bush, but not all at once obviously. This can lead to a little more continuity, but even then, there are some jarring juxtapositions as you mention.
I think what I fear missing is the pacing and emotional flow of the album. That was so much a part of listening for so long, and now I have to deliberately choose it, which is a little weird.
I certainly hear your point for classical music, in which the pace and flow of a work through differing movements is critical. It is interesting, when I was ripping my dvd-a of Chicago II, I edited two versions of the longer work Ballet For A Girl In Buchanon. One version breaks out the songs, and the other keeps the melange together as a whole.
My wife prefers the latter, but it feels weird to her that the longer rip contains a song that was on a different side of the album. Her memory of the music does not include that, so it is a bit jarring. I think I will do the same thing with side two of Abbey Road.
Trey
I have tried using a music server in shuffle mode. The discontinuity that occurs when randomly shuffling musical selections doesn't "flow". When playing music from my regular sources I skip from artist to artist from genre to genre. There is a sense of continuity when I select tunes that is completely missing with the computers random selections. The sense of a cohesive direction not unlike good radio DJ's used to achieve (before Clear Channel) just doesn't happen with computer shuffled selections.
I rarely play an entire CD or LP unless it's classical. One or maybe two tunes get heard before I move to another artist. For instance, I may start a listening session with Sultans Of Swing. An hour later Coltrane and Johnny Hartman are tickling my ears. I get from Dire Straights to Trane with one song leading to another. There is a sense of flow and direction that's missing with the computer shuffling the music. My next door neighbor once asked me, "What radio station are you listening to?". Computer shuffling just can't get that kind of smooth flow.
Once I get my entire collection on an HDD (or 2) I'll be able to do it by pointing and clicking. I can do it now with what I've already ripped but most of my vinyl collection hasn't been ripped yet. Ripping my CD collection was a fairly easy task. A thousand+ CD's were done in a couple of weeks. My LP library is almost four times as large and the job isn't going as quickly. I start listening to vinyl I haven't played in a while and forget about the whole ripping process.
BTW:
I'm keeping every LP, CD and tape.
Joe, thanks for your response. Like you, I am keeping the physical media, well, most of it. I have some 10 inch jazz lps that I will sell and use the money to buy more vinyl!
Have you tried high res scanning of the vinyl? Last night I was ripping Sgt. Peppers at 24/96. The files douns quite good, not really like the vinyl, but better than cd in many cases. Give it a try!
Trey
Having my music collection on a computer has changed my listening in another way. I have well over 2000 CDs. For my favorites (especially Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) I may have 6-14 different recordings of each work. The J. River player software remembers what I have so I don't have to. I can browse much quicker and more effectively than I could look through the physical CDs. As I browse, I often notice a recording or a work I was not thinking about or something I had forgotten about.
Sometimes I want to listen to a particular work. I browse to see a list of the performances I have and pick one. With physical CDs, I could never file all the performances together since most CDs had more than one work.
I rarely listen to all the works that were on a classical music CD. With CDs, if I didn't want to listen to all the works on a CD, I had to jump up after a work finished and stop playback before the next work began.
As far as I'm concerned, PC based playback works the way playback should. Physical CDs are just unnecessary limitations.
Bill
Great post.
Amazing benefit of computer listening.
You are motivating me!
It would be fun for cover versions of popular sonmgs, too!
Thnaks for your take, I enjoyed thinking about what you mentioned!
Intriguing. Do you make connections between the pieces in any way (tempo, emotional reaction, lyric theme, anything)? Is it a knowing process, or do you suddenly feel compelled to listen to something which then becomes the next thing to play?
As a separate observation I find it helpful to have multiple performances of the same classical work together. It's fun to compare and contrast.
I've been doing it since I got a sound card capable of HD audio. I regularly record all LP's at 48kHz. I've also been downloading 24/96 HD tracks. All in all I really like the convenience with a music server. In the near future I'll be rebuilding my media server with ultra quiet fans. I've already got everything but a quiet case and Blu-Ray burner.
"All in all I really like the convenience with a music server."
We do keep going for the convenience, don't we. We all found out that CD's didn't sound quite as good as our vinyl, but they were a lot more convenient. Not only did you not have to get up to turn the record over, you could even fall asleep listening to them with no risk of damaging them or your equipment. Plus, it looked like we might have no other choice - vinyl releases had died away. Now it's servers that represent the ultimate in convenience - especially when we can get some nifty devices for dealing with their digital output, and when we can download some music at higher resolution.
I'm still pretty much stuck in the old ways. Oh, I've ripped some vinyl that was damaged to clean it up, and I've built a data base of every recorded selection I own, but the music isn't on a server. I only use the data base to find what I want to play. I got lucky when vinyl made its comeback. All I've bought recently is vinyl, and I guess I'll die listening the way I always have.
Hey, don't get it wrong Dixieland. For serious listening I use my TT, CD player, Reel to Reel and Cassette deck(s). Well, maybe not the cassette deck. Note the order I listed my sources.
When I'm veggin' out the music server is it.
BTW: I actually keep track of my "music library" using a database I wrote for MS Access. Every recording and individual selection is listed.
Computer has changed the way I listen because it selects and plays stuff that I forgot that I had and I am continuously surprised by the great music that I have and don't listen to when I choose.
Are you implying that a music server won't sound as good as a CD player.
I have found that a good music server based system sounds at least as good as a CD based system and is perfect for serious listening.
I retired my CD transport several years ago and have never regretted it.
Indeed, there are reasons why a hard drive system may be a better way to get the data to the DAC according to some.
Struts or Elk would be better at explaining this. I apologize for not living up to my "resident expert" status
No, tomjtx, I wasn't implying anything of the sort. Just stating that I hadn't put my collection on a server, and didn't have any desire to despite the added convenience which would result. I thought my use of the phrase "stuck in the old ways" made my point clear. My CD player - a Marantz SA 11S1 - is probably about as good as my aging ears, but whether it is better than a server output, I have no idea. I'm also not as much into critical listening as I once was - more inclined to just enjoy the music.
Your "apology" is accepted.
Good point. Really good music can lie dormant in any collection. I find that out every now and then when my wife plays something I might not have chosen.