iPod, listening habits etc...

[deeaa]

Since the arrival of iPods, the past 5 or so years, my listening preferences have changed quite significantly. I possess two iPods, one 40G which is filled with rock only and I listen to while cruising in the car, and a 160G one which is half-full with all genres of music and I also watch a lot of movies and podcasts on, for instance when putting the kid to sleep or such.

They've completely changed the way I listen to music...I guess for most people they do.

I no more listen to complete albums...I just shuffle the thing...and from such a vast collection, I don't even remember how much but 10.000 plus songs, several thousand artists anyway (from many only 1 or 2 songs), I get to listen to all kinds of music. It could go from Cream to Abba to Laguna Coil to Dvorak to Swinging Blue Jeans to Lamb of God etc...which is great.

But it also means a lot of the time I don't even know what band/artist it is that is playing, or if that, at least not the release/year, and if those, well at least song names are complete mystery to me 90% of the time. Just a while back I checked, it was some band called 'UFO' that is totally obscure to me, but nevertheless it was quite an OK hardrock tune.

For instance I like Billy Talent a lot, have all the albums and have listened to them through several times but I think I can maybe remember two songs by name.

Which reminds me, not being a native English speaker, I suppose I don't much care what the lyrics are about. Be it about raping old women and full of F-and C- and whatever words or the other way around, children's tales it's all the same to me. I guess that differs for English-speakers.

Ah, enough babbling...

[SuperSwede]

and full of F-and C- and whatever words

Ah that must be Dvorak.. :D

[Geraint Jones]

Deea , thats made me laugh , it`s exactly the way way my listening has gone as well ,I like to think the shuffle is the best radio station in the world . We had a few beers the other night and had a competion with the kids trying to mime who was playing, it was hilarious [ think of a 5 year old trying to explain a Flock of Seagulls ] , as you say with 10k songs you`re never going to remember some obscure Stax release .

[just strum]

Sometimes I feel like the last person on earth that does not have an Ipod, never had and Ipod, or for that matter never even used an Ipod.

I guess I just won't give up my 8-track and turntable.

[marnold]

I don't have an iPod either. Probably never will because I wouldn't want to go through the hassle of getting it working on Linux with iTunes. Nevertheless, I have a CD/MP3 player in my car and PocketTunes on my Palm TX. My Palm becomes my music source when we're traveling in the van. The CD/MP3 player in my car can't do full-disc shuffle--one of the very, very few thinks I don't like about it. As a result, I have a CD packed with my favorite songs all dumped into one directory. I can shuffle through that to my heart's content. Did that with my Palm TX too, although that's on a 4G SD card so I have a lot more room for songs. Guess I need an in-dash player than can read DVD-Rs.

Generally speaking artists hate iPods because the shuffle feature "ruins the concept of the album." My response to that is that if you are listening to most vaguely popular music, that train left the station 30 years ago. They'll also complain that you are taking the songs that the painstakingly tweaked the sound of and listening to them in a lossy compression format through tiny earbuds. To me, the artist should produce the art and then the cash-spending public can listen to it in any way they please.

I will say that the advent of the MP3 and MP3 stores like Amazon, Emusic, et al, have given me the reason/excuse/ability to buy more music and listen to more music. If any artists want to complain about that, then they're beyond hope.