The Reed and Pickup

I’ve mentioned the Mullenweg Skirmishes already in my re-introduction post. However, I first started out with Wordpress in the early 2010s and even won a Wales Blog Award for the technology category in its inaugural year.

However, it was in essence a second phase of maintaining a home on the internet. The first phase was in the days of Netscape Communicator and Frontpage. I would build static websites before they were cool. Sure, they looked dreadful by today’s standards, but they were mine.

The decision to give up my own little corner of the internet was one borne out of despondence more than anything. I was getting frustrated with the LLM fad, the flagrant disregard of platform holders –particularly Wordpress, to respect the efforts of their users in the pursuit of training materials for Grand Theft Autocomplete.

At the time it felt easier to just walk away entirely. I nearly did, but not having a place to call my own didn’t feel right somehow. I hope that Micro.Blog will serve me well.

As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated “content” in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels. - Cory Doctorow - The Coprophagic AI crisis

I’d like to think that humans continuing to write or create art solely for the benefit of other humans is something worth clinging onto, however futile it may seem right now.

Photo taken on St David’s Day in Cardiff, Wales. Shot on a Nikon F80 with 50mm F1.8, Ilford XP2 film.

Those of you who may have known me from Mastodon, or from Wordpress before the Mullenweg Skirmishes --that’s what I’m going to call it from now on. I found myself in a place were I didn’t see much point trying to carve out my own little space on an internet I was convinced would be overwhelmed by AI Slop before the decade was out.

The Skirmishes gave me a plausible excuse to get out, save a bit of money and spend some more time in the real world.

I then had this crazy idea about making an online music magazine. But then I remembered I quite like music but didn’t really want to make it feel like a job. So, I binned that. Besides, I had started building it in Ghost, which is great but much more than I really need.

So, then I was then pointed towards Micro.Blog by someone on Mastodon and...it’s five bucks a month and seems like a far better fit. I still had the domain there waiting to be used so, here I am.

I’m Gavin, a middle-aged guy from Wales. I like taking photos, I like technical death metal and its softer, brassier cousin, jazz. I’ve also had a long time love-affair with Paradise Lost. No, not the John Milton poem but the doom metal band from the north of England.

Pleased to meet you.

Between the days of compact cassettes and the arrival of the iPod, there was no ideal way of carrying your music around with you. Sure, the Sony Walkman was legendary in the portable music world, but cassettes were still a nuisance that would chew up if you so much as looked at them the wrong way.

Also, you couldn’t jump to the track you wanted to listen to and too much messing around would see you having to untangle the tape from the read heads in the player. Winding your tape back in with a cheap ballpoint pen was a common occurrence.

CDs were the main format by the early 90s, but portable CD players were pretty awful. Shock protection wasn’t really a thing in those early portable CD players, so you had to place them flat on a table and hope nobody with heavy feet walks by too quickly. Also, battery life was often atrocious. See, these were dark times.

However, Minidisc changed all that.

In around 1998 I picked up my first Minidisc player/recorder. It was an AIWA AM-F65 and it was a revelation.

Nearly CD quality, shock proof and with the ability to jump straight to the track you want. You could also delete tracks and replace them with others. I was hooked, recording disc after disc with the optical cable. Come the early 2000s and I’d have my first proper car too. Sure enough, I put a Kenwood (KMD-44) Minidisc head unit in there, so I could listen to all of those discs in the car too. A year later, Minidisc would appear in The Matrix. If it was good enough for Neo, it was probably good enough for me.

Whilst digital music was starting to appear in Ye Olde Internet, storage was still a problem outside of a 3.5″ desktop hard drive and connection speeds were glacial, with most of us rocking a 56kbit dial-up modem at the most. Portable devices with the ability to hold more than around 64MB of data were still to catch on. Heck, not even USB was all that well established and where it was, it was slow. Early music players like the iPod or Creative Jukebox shipped with a Parallel or Firewire connection along with USB1.

Minidisc used a form of compression called ATRAC to provide the same recording time as a CD, but in a much smaller package. It worked by removing sounds that were masked by other sounds –a process not too dissimilar to MP3, which we’ll be hearing about later. Best of all, you had to listen really carefully to notice any difference to the CD version.

Minidiscs were double sided and housed in a caddy, much like the old floppy disks we were (sadly) still using at the time –USB flash storage was still in its infancy too. The caddy meant they were surprisingly durable and ideal for listening on the move, or dropping down under your seat in the car, never to be seen again.

At the time, the best way to transfer music to Minidisc was using an optical (TOSLINK) cable, out of the back of a CD player. Once recorded, you could then edit the track names, so they would scroll by on the LCD screen and in-line remote. I’ll be honest, this part was really fiddly, but you got used to it after a while.

In 2001 the iPod would launch. Whilst it wasn’t the first mp3 player, its integration with the iTunes Store would prove too tempting a funnel for music listeners. By the mid 2000s it was pretty much all MP3, or Apple’s own AAC.

2001 was also the year Sony would release NetMD, sensing that it was about to be eaten alive by the MP3 players that were starting to appear. This would allow you to transfer your MP3s onto a disc and mess around with the track names using your computer, negating the need for a CD player, which was also on borrowed time.

Whilst Minidisc never really caught on in the US, it did to a certain extent in Europe, but still not to the degree that it did in Japan, where it would be a going concern up until the 2010s.

Sadly, the writing was on the wall out here in the west by the early 2000s and in 2003 I found myself with a Creative Nomad Jukebox 2 and didn’t really look back. A few more Creative players entered my collection, before an iPod Classic and then the iPhone 3G.

However, I’m feeling quite nostalgic at the moment. I’ve just acquired my first Minidisc player in over 20 years and…it’s strangely exciting. I picked up the Sony MD-N707, boxed with all accessories and a handful of blank discs for about £100 on eBay. It was in mint condition and I’ve just spent a few hours transferring a couple of my favourite albums onto the blank discs –Whitechapel’s ‘Kin’, Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ and Paradise Lost’s ‘Draconian Times’.

Minidisc today

Whilst Sony shipped its last minidisc devices in 2013, TEAC and TASCAM continued making devices up until 2020. Blank minidiscs are also still fairly easy to get hold of, particularly Sony’s Niege range.

If you can find a device in good condition, you’ll likely get some good use out of it for years to come, particularly if it uses regular AA batteries. My MD-N707 uses a single rechargeable AA battery, which are still readily available.

You’ll need a source with an optical/TOSLINK output, or if you have a NetMD recorder, some software. This is where things get slightly thorny.

Way back when NetMD first appeared, Sony released its SonicStage software to support it, but that has long since been abandoned and is difficult to get running on Windows 10 or 11. Thankfully, an enterprising fellow named Stefano Brilli released a web application called Web Minidisc Pro that allows you to transfer music onto your NetMD device. You can access it through the ever-useful Minidisc Wiki.

Whilst it works… most of the time, it will occasionally fail without warning. However, I’ve successfully written a few discs now and all is good.

Thoughts

Whilst I’m as equally guilty as anyone for abandoning minidisc when the shiny new MP3s came along, I’m becoming acutely aware of what we’ve lost in these intervening years.

Back then, music devices had replaceable storage (Minidiscs, cassettes etc), replaceable batteries and were fairly easy to open up and replace parts when they wore out.

Nowadays, you’re likely to be listening to music from a streaming service that you will likely pay forever with nothing to show for it, whilst the artist also receives next to nothing for your investment, on a device with a battery and storage that has a finite lifespan, but cannot be easily replaced.

I have a sinking feeling that we need to turn back before we lose physical media and serviceable devices forever. I’m really glad people have taken to vinyl again. It’s not for me, I like CDs too much, but there’s a lot to be said for owning your favourite music in all its forms and formats.

As for minidisc, it is nice having a music player that doesn’t require an internet connection (I can still use TOSLINK); isn’t arbitrarily limited by the manufacturer’s firmware updates; and requires only single rechargeable AA battery to run.

If the end of the internet does come, at least I’ll still have something to listen to. My task for the coming days is to get the camera out again –my nostalgia collection has a few disc-shaped gaps in it.

There’s a lot to be said for having access to nearly all the music that has ever existed since the dawn of time, for ten bucks a month.

Then again, if the thought of waking up to discover your favourite album had been wiped from the face of the Earth brings you out in an icy cold sweat, perhaps it is time to rethink your relationship with the songs you hold dear.

The land before streaming

Believe it or not, there was a time when the internet didn’t exist. There were times when the only music you could listen to was on the radio and it would largely fit into three groups - classical music, pop music, or even more pop music. The only way for a disaffected youth such as myself to get hold of anything with more vigour was by setting the VCR to record at some ungodly hour of the morning to catch the latest Beavis & Butthead, or Noisy Mothers.

Either that, or you would have to take a chance and buy the album on your preferred physical format. This often meant you would either end up with something you would cling to for years, or a real stinker that had the single you quite liked.

It wouldn’t be until the early 2000s when you could reliably get music from the internet, but at that point it was either obtained from a legal grey area, or it had DRM and all the potential complications that brings.

Much later, music streaming services would arrive allowing people to pay a flat fee to listen to everything they had available at the time. So, society did what it was told by the people selling the streaming service –get rid of your CDs and vinyl, we’ve got everything here…

Attachment styles

I’m well aware not everyone feels the same way about music as I do. There are plenty of people who won’t dwell on the music they enjoyed in the past. There’s plenty of music coming out every week to satisfy even the most voracious listener.

I’m not like that. I will listen to new music, but if it gets its hooks into me it will stay with me for the long haul. I still listen to albums from the late 80s and early 90s on a regular basis. If Pearl Jam’s Vs; Alice In Chains' Dirt or Paradise Lost’s Draconian Times were to vanish from streaming services I would be beyond mortified.

I don’t like the idea that my continued access to certain albums (or songs from those albums) is predicated on the continued agreements of corporations, whether they are representing the artist or the service.

Physical formats are the only way to ensure the music you love will always be available to you.

The changing face of physical

Unfortunately, whilst there was a time when you could buy a CD player from nearly anywhere, in the mid 2020s they’re becoming a niche item with a distinctly niche price. Yes, you can buy used, but as mechanical devices they will probably fail at some point.

It may be that they disappear completely in a few years. I think we need to expand our definition of physical accordingly.

If you think about what you get with a CD –a collection of DRM-free files on a disc, each file being 16bit and 44khz. From that you can create lossless FLAC files or lossy MP3s. You also get a physical booklet, which is nice.

If you can live without the booklet, you are left with just the files. It is still possible to buy DRM-free files from places such as Bandcamp, 7Digital and my new favourite place, Qobuz.

Once you have the files you can use them however you see fit. Nobody can remove them from your hard drive without you knowing. You do need to keep backups though.

I currently use Qobuz to discover new music, before buying the CD or FLAC files to stream from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device running Plex. Plex (with Plex Pass) works like your own do-it-yourself streaming service.

Alternatively, you can import ALAC files into Apple Music, but note that if you do, make sure you keep a separate backup of them. Apple Music likes to replace your files with its own DRM versions without so much as a warning.

The third option is to buy a portable music player. This is ideal for people with high-impedance headphones (typically over 30 ohms) or those who don’t want all of their eggs in a smartphone-shaped basket. Sony still makes these, as do Fiio. Astell & Kern have a few portable players for people with slightly deeper pockets.

Why own your music?

Apart from the prospect of your favourite album disappearing from streaming services, there are other benefits to owning a copy of your favourite music.

Aside from the obvious point about your CD or vinyl still working even if you stop paying that monthly fee, the major difference between a physical release and a stream is the amount of money the artist receives.

Here, there is no comparison. One stream on Spotify pays about three-tenths of a penny — that means 1,000 streams pays $3. To put it a bit differently, you would need 3,000 streams to make $9, about the same profit you will make when you sell one CD at a concert for $10. CD vs. Streaming: The answer to which did better in 2022 is not as simple as you think

The second point is that the CD will usually sound better. All CDs are mastered to a lossless 16bit, 44kHz. It may be a little less than the original master (possibly 24bit, 192kHz), but unless the streaming service offers lossless files, or if you are really lucky, hi-res lossless the CD will most likely sound better.

Yes, there is some variation between streaming services, but the CD is usually the best way to listen.

Best of all, you’ll have a shiny disc with some nice artwork to put on your shelf.