Digital music can change your life
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Hi – I’m Russell Beeson, the DU Tutor for the area around Poole in Dorset. I’ve been teaching beginners for about 5 years and I’m always looking for life-enriching uses of computers.
I can honestly say that digital music has changed my life, and it could change yours too.
A couple of years ago I hardly knew what an iPod was, let alone a playlist. These seemed to be things reserved for the younger generation, along with texting and FaceBook.
Everything changed when I decided to buy a USB turntable and started transferring my rather large collection of vinyl LPs onto the computer and thence onto CDs, using the amazing free software package Audacity to get rid of the worst of the scratches and to split up records into tracks. Cassettes soon followed and the result was a large collection of home-produced CDs, perfectly playable in the car or on any CD player. An excellent start, I thought, as I could now easily play music which had languished in cupboards for years.
The next logical step was to consider the world of MP3 players and iPods. I started with a cheap SanDisk MP3 player – perfectly good in its price range but with a rather small capacity (2GB). I fairly quickly upgraded to an 8GB iPod Nano, and this is where things got rather more interesting. Getting to know the iTunes website opened up a whole new style of playing music. Before long I was downloading favourite old pop music which I hadn’t listened to for years, and ripping my own CDs, both bought and home-made, and using the power of iTunes to organise and categorise the music.
Although my tastes are predominantly classical, I found looking at other people’s Top 100 song recommendations, and downloading things I liked the sound of, opened my eyes to some wonderful pop, rock and jazz music I had never heard before. Using Spotify gives you an opportunity to listen to a track before deciding whether or not to pay for a download – yet another wonderful innovation, which seems almost too good to be true.
My other passion is gardening, and I now get the very greatest of pleasure from listening to my own choice of music of many genres whilst doing the weeding. It’s absolute heaven!
My next thought is to offer a service to my clients, many of whom have large collections on vinyl and cassette, but have neither the time, inclination nor equipment to digitise their music. Time will tell whether there is a worthwhile demand for this service.
October 26th, 2009 bobholmes | 1 Comment »
January 28th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
I wholeheartedly agree, love my ipod, about 4 or 5 years old now and the newer itouch but it is imperative you keep a back up of your music, all my CD’s have long gone. Trouble is there are very few places or courses for older people to learn more than the basics in IT and most pensioners cannot afford the prices of private tutoring.