While My Turntable Gently Weeps

At heart, I'm a vinyl man. Always have been, always will be. Back when I was running Chunk Records, I had over 30 releases, only about five of which were CDs. The rest were 45s and LPs. I resisted the CD format at first, because it seemed somehow cold, and the shrinkage on the cover art was appalling. I later embraced the compact disc because it became the undoing of the greedy pigs of the record industry, who lacked the foresight to realize that digital media could be copied endlessly without generational loss. Napster and its stepchildren fucked them but good, but it was too damn bad: they'd sown the seeds of their own downfall.

Now, the industry has almost managed a full recovery, thanks to iTunes and the ubiquitous iPod, in the process taking a giant step backward, away from the full-length album and returning to the single. At 99 cents a pop. Actually, they've jacked it up to a buck-twenty-nine, which is bullshit, but so it goes.

Which is my long-winded preamble to the news that I have joined the 21st century: I got an iPod for my birthday. It's a mere 8 GB, so it only holds a fraction of my collection, but it's still pretty cool. I like the way the cover art comes up on the little screen when the track is playing, even if said artwork is even smaller than CD and about 8% of the size of an old-school album cover. Because I'm a record geek, I went online and found JPEGs of various picture sleeves and label shots to properly adorn the songs.

The little thumbnails I created for my podcasts look pretty cool as well. Hopefully, now that I've uploaded them, anybody who downloads the shows off of iTunes will get them as well. Not sure how that works.

Of course, now I want one of the 160 GB models, so I can dump as much of my collection into it as I can.

I'm so easily corrupted...