D'vorahDavida
Yetzirah

When Music Technology Was New
Sat Jun 07 2003

So get this.

This morning my husband let me use his CD burner and I compiled a CD from a bunch we have in our player in the living room.
I am playing it now on my computer as I type this. It has Peter Gabriel,
Andrea Boccelli, Underworld, Prince of Egypt, and Celine Dion. Kinda sick eh ? Not exactly anything with a theme, but what can I say, I like them all. For different reasons.

Now this may seem like no big deal to a lot of you, no big deal at all.

(You got that right cupcake, big whup, you burned a CD )

Well the thing about it is I remember when the ONLY way I could listen to my favorite music was to sit in front of our little stereo watching the vinyl records go round and round on the turntable. I used to wait until I was the only one in the house, or my little brother was asleep and my parents had gone out for the evening when I was babysitting. I would have this whole orchestrated thing going on with the albums. I would go through my Dad's albums at first (Johnny Mathis, Barbara Streisand, Harry Belefonte) and then later when I got older, I had a few of my own.
(Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, and of course, The Beatles)

I would line them up in the order that I wanted to listen to them. Then I would sit right in front of the stereo so when one song was over I could lift up the arm and put it on the next song I wanted to hear on that side. Then off would come that record and another one got put on. It was all very touchy feely. The ultimate interactive music experience. And frankly, I still miss the kind of mellow sound of vinyl records. They had a certain quality to them…

But then it happened. Somebody invented cassette tapes.

My brother and I were BESIDE ourselves because we could now take music WITH us. Even though the Panasonic cassette player we had was about the size of a small suitcase. And back then, headphones looked like the kind pilots wear or something, and you only used them with a real stereo in your house. The only thing that came with this machine was a little ear plug that was made of off white plastic, for one ear only. It was pretty lame.

We lived in a rural area surrounded by mountains that did not get good radio reception and so having a portable cassette player with batteries was a whole new musical experience. . . for us anyway. We tried taping our records with the funky little microphone that came with the recorder, but of course you get all the room noises and lots of hiss and stuff. We immediately realized we needed AN ADAPTER CORD, so we could plug in to the back of the stereo and record straight from that. (Just take a moment and look behind your computer)…..OH!

CORDS everywhere you look ! They have been multiplying since then you see….

Well, we have been goofing around with music ever since. Recording favorites onto cassettes. I have a drawer FULL of them that I still listen to. But now, my husband has this CD burner and I can mix my own CD’s . You can get a lot of music on a CD.

My old walkman is about to croak on me. I have used the poor thing to death, and now I am wondering if I should just get a portable CD player and give up on cassettes. This is a rather traumatic decision for me, AND my drawer full of cassette tapes. After all I have been using them since 1967. You can’t say that about many technologies of late, what what?

And to add to the confusion, I have songs on cassettes that I obviously don’t have on CD, so how am I going to transfer those to the CD burner?

Do you think they make an adapter cord for THAT ?

It’s a very strange thing, technology. Very strange indeed.


5 Comments
  • From:
    Tinkerbell (Unauthenticated) (Legacy)
    On:
    Fri Jun 06 2003
    Now I am dancing to a long lost tune not a record,tape. or CD . I think my brain is fried with all this new teck .
  • From:
    Pragmatist (Legacy)
    On:
    Sat Jun 07 2003
    When you figure out how to record the cassettes to a CD, will you please let me know how you do it? I have cassettes and cassettes and cassettes, and now I have this neat new computer that will let me play CDs. But I don't have any recorded CDs, just blank ones.

    There must be a way.

    Shalom.
  • From:
    RealmOfRachel (Legacy)
    On:
    Sat Jun 07 2003
    I'm impressed with you for burning a cd it took me four tries to get it right before I discovered I'd been trying to burn the cd to the wrong side of the disc. Oopsie! I'm supposedly a CD child but I've always loved vinyl I miss the smell of it Cds may play better but they don't smell right!
    Hugs
    Rach xxx
  • From:
    Bookworm (Legacy)
    On:
    Sun Jun 08 2003
    Lol, I remember eight track players, too. ;-)
  • From:
    Diane (Unauthenticated) (Legacy)
    On:
    Thu Jun 12 2003
    Bookworm, I was thinking the same thing -- 8 track tapes! I remember my parents had an eight track player in their car. I was 19 and we were driving to and from Porterville, CA. (A small agricultural town in the valley.) I was getting married and we went there from San Bruno in the Bay Area for a "Get-To-Know Diane" cocktail party given by my former mother-in-law at her home to meet my future husbands friends and relatives. I brought one 8 track tape with me, Joan Baez's Any Day Now -- all Dylan tunes, an endless amount. Oh how I LOVED this 8 track! Poor Dad -- Joan's haunting, beautiful, operatic voice drove him mad on the 4 hour each way drive. But dear heart, what could he say to his daughter he was about to lose to another man? Bless his heart. I think he was actually wearing ear plugs on the drive home!