Moving Backwards
I did two things this week that might seem counterintuitive:
1) I moved all the music (that I really wanted to keep, anyway) from an old hard drive to my Macbook and my iPhone. 2) I have reverted to using corded headphones.
On 1 -- I kind of did this on a whim. Elaine needed a hard drive, and I rememberd that we had a 1TB lying around that had a backup of my old Macbook on it. When I was looking in there to clean things up for her, I saw all my old music and thought it would be fun to have access to on a regular basis. Over the last few years, I've been collecting CDs every once in a while. Usually when we go to Half Price Books, I spend the first 10 - 15 minutes of the visit perusing the CD area just to see if there's anything I want to add to the collection.
Anyway, I pulled all that music over to the Macbook, added album art to make things a little more colorful and fun, and then transferred everything over to my phone. I still have access to Spotify and won't likely get rid of it. But you know, there's just something about listening to music that you know is yours. Of course this also leads to listening to full albums a little more often as well (I was already trying to do that, but Spotify makes it so easy to get lost in algo-shuffle). Who knows? Maybe one day I'll ditch Spotify and go back to just my owned collection. There's something good in that, I just don't quite know what it is yet.
On 2 -- this is a little more of just a pragmatic move. My AirPods Pro are starting to give up the ghost a little bit. They still work, and the battery's ok. But if you have them in and you move around at all, both headphones are starting to crackle. What's frustrating about that is that this is an indicator that this tech is essentially "disposable." I have corded headphones that have worked for YEARS. Are they somewhat less convenient because I'm physically tied to my device? Sure. But they also never fail to connect to my phone or laptop. And the sound is as good as (or better than) my wireless headphones. We're literally talking about the free headphones that used to come with phones.
Two ways I moved "backwards" this week. But I think there is just a little more joy there than infinite choice and the lack of a tether. Maybe what's shiny isn't always what's best.
