At the end of the 1990’s came another technological change that had a pretty big impact on how I manage my music. It was Windows Media Play 6.4. If you have been following along, you know that I have always treated my Compact Discs like Master Recordings. I didn’t expose them to scratchy CD wallets or leave them languishing in the heat of the car. If I wanted to take them on the road, I transferred a copy to cassette and placed the master on the shelf of my reasonably climate controlled basement.
The exception was bringing them to the office where I would play my favorite Compact Discs on my computer while I worked. In 1999, the new version of Windows Media Player was released and somehow I accidentally discovered that I could copy my CD’s to my hard drive and play them music without having the CD present. I know it seems ridiculous now after almost 15 years but remember this was years before iTunes and the digital media craze swept the nation.
I brought CD’s in every day and ripped them to my hard drive. soon I had most of my music readily available. It really changed how I listened to music. The word Shuffle took on a new meaning as I would listen to an artist or genre or custom playlist. All these things we take for granted today were brand new to me in the 1990’s and it was cool.
Over the next decade, hard drives got bigger, faster and cheaper. Digital music bit rates got higher. I’ve re-ripped all my CD’s a few times as compression technology improves. At that is how it began. Today I’m sitting inches away from almost 50,000 songs that take up nearly 300GB of hard drive space. Windows Media Player would evolve over the next decade too. Those changes would add to the may I listen to and manage my music. So I’d have to say that this was a pretty significant milestone.