Our iPod

When iPods first came out, we saved up our money and bought the (then) biggest hard drive available, the 60GB.  You see, I had already spent the previous several years converting much of our huge (over 5000 CDs) music collection to MP3 format for the purpose of listening to it on my work computer.   I had converted them to the smallest format, because the sound quality wasn't important - I still have the CDs, after all.  What I was after was radio broadcast quality, and radio broadcast-like variety, except with my own CDs.

Plus, as we've purchased many, many used CDs in bulk over the last five years, I've also uploaded a number of those CDs to our iPod as well - so, as of this morning that I write this, we have nearly 28,000 songs on our 60GB iPod (with room for another several thousand more)!

Once all of these were uploaded to the iPod, I then created a series of playlists, from which to narrow the selections (28,000 is a lot to choose from!).  For starters, I created a playlist called 'All The Hits,' which (as you might expect) is a collection of all of the songs that we have that might have been a hit, or had a lot of airplay, or is otherwise a well-known song.  That particular playlist has over 4,000 songs on it.  As I've been typing this, we've been listening to our 'All The Hits' playlist, and I've heard 'White Wedding' by Billy Idol, 'The Dark of the Matinee' by Franz Ferdinand, 'I Don't Wanna Stop' by Ozzy Osbourne, 'Satisfaction Guaranteed' by The Firm, 'Babe' by Styx, 'Vertigo' by U2, and (currently playing) 'Who Are You' by The Who.

So, we have a bit of variety.

I've also created other playlists, such as 'Beatlemania,' which collects all of the Beatles recordings, as well as all of their solo material; I've done similar playlists for all of my favorite bands (and are ones that I have all of their CDs), such as The Monkees, UFO, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, The Doors, Matchbox Twenty, Paul Simon, Pearl Jam, The Rolling Stones, Rush, Van Halen and (of course) Yes.

As I noted, we have a lot of CDs.

Recently, I created shortened versions of these playlists - for example, one is 'Matchbox Twenty 25,' which collects (what we consider to be) the best 25 MB20 songs into one playlist.  We've done this for all of the bands mentioned above.  So, we have choices amongst are playlists for our favorite bands - do you feel like hearing an exhaustive overview, or perhaps a flavorful sampling?  We can do either for all of those (and other) bands.

We've also sorted those 28,000 songs into decades - we have playlists for 'Oldies' (everything prior to 1970, excluding classical music, which has its own playlist), '70s,' '80s,' '90s' and 'Millenium Now,' which collects everything from 2000 to present.  These playlists are somewhat unwieldly, as they includes hits, album tracks, obscurities and pretty much everything in between. 

With these and other playlists that we've created, it probably goes without saying that we don't much listen to the radio anymore!  Pretty much every single song that we like, or even tolerate, is collected in one place.  Plus, we have a Logitech player, that plays our iPod through stereo speakers - I highly recommend this, because even though our MP3s were captured at low bitrates, this player makes everything sound like it's coming from a CD.

So, consider this blogpost a primer for future articles - now that you know that we have all of this music, I'll be writing about the various songs that I hear while I'm working to get new items listed on eBay!