Out With The Old...

This week I said goodbye to a dear and cherished companion. We had a valued and mutually fulfilling relationship that lasted more than four years. I'll never forget our countless strolls in the sun together, our huddling close under the umbrella in the harsh winter weather, or those cozy times alone when there was nothing else to do because the power went out. She was always there to brighten my days and whisper lovely things in my ear. But your heart need not be heavy, because our breakup isn't a sad one. She's still happy and healthy despite having outlived her usefulness, and was even graciously understanding when she realized I had found a more attractive, intuitive, and versatile model to replace her.

Okay, I hope by now that you realize I'm not talking about a person, but rather about a music player ... specifically, my old Sony NetMD player. When I first looked at MiniDisc players, I was quite fascinated by the concept of being able to carry around five CDs worth of music on a gizmo that was less than half the size of my CD player. Purely digital MP3 players (the MiniDisc used a "magneto-optical" storage system) were a very new thing at that point, and since it was still a year or so before I really dove headfirst into music obsession, an iPod would have been overkill for me -- not to mention the fact that at the time I didn't have a computer that could support iTunes (let alone a bank account that could support buying an iPod).

The NetMD MiniDisc players were the next best thing to the iPod. Users had a choice of two software programs which came along with the player. One was kind-of like iTunes in that you could rip your CDs to your hard drive and then "check" them into or out of a MiniDisc (this odd system was designed to limit copying of any given MP3 file), but I opted for the simpler approach of just putting my CDs in and ripping them one by one directly to the MiniDisc. It was a lot slower than iTunes, and not nearly as elegant a method ... plus, if you only had a limited number of MiniDiscs at your disposal, you had to get out the CD and load it all over again if you had erased the MiniDisc it was on previously.

For its time, it was quite handy and versatile, even though the technology's shortcomings are evident now. MiniDiscs were like CDs in that you could customize their contents and instantly cue up whatever track you wanted; they were like CD-RWs in that you could record, erase, and re-record thousands of times; and they were like 3.5" floppy discs in how they looked and functioned -- the disc was encased in a rugged plastic housing with a sliding aluminum shutter through which the player read the media. Don't get me wrong ... I totally love my iPod and can't imagine getting along without one, but there was something about that clunky old system that I look back on fondly and will even miss in a way. I hope it's happy with its new owner, 'cause for as well as it served me over the years, it deserves to be.
















Oh, by the way ... how do you like my new header graphic? Spiffy, eh?