How do you find the time?
I set up a new playlist in iTunes the other night, configured to include songs which I hadn't listened to before (or rather, songs I hadn't listened to all the way through - iTunes only increases the Play counter at the end of the song, as far as I can work out).
I was shocked. There were over 2,300 songs in the list, which is about 15 per cent of my library. A lot of it was very familiar stuff I'd ripped from old CDs and never listened to again, but still. 2,300 songs!
Add to that the landslide of other digital material - YouTube videos, interesting articles in the New Yorker, RSS feeds pouring in every morning, all of it good stuff, all of it needing to be consumed - and you start to wonder: how am I ever going to get round to all this stuff?
So, some questions: where do you listen to music these days? Amidst this cornucopia of abundance, have you found yourself needing to deliberately organise yourself to listen? Has this changed your attitude to music (is it, for instance, more commoditised)? And as your MP3 collection expands to fill hard drives with more capacity than Alan Turing could have dreamed about, are you beginning to find it all rather oppressive?
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Absolutely utterly agree
About once a year I find myself actually getting stressed that I'm not listening to enough music, watching enough films, reading enough books etc., at which point I try and take a step back and realise that this is leisure time we're talking about, and calm down...
My coping mechanism is to enter "random" mode for a while, set the iPod to only play tracks added in the last few months (to give them a fair hearing), and pile up the books & DVDs and just go through them in the order they sit in the pile - once I take the "What next?! What next?!" element away, I soon get back to just enjoying the stuff rather than fretting about how fast (or slowly) I'm devouring it...
It's easy to fall into the trap of just ticking things off a list though, one more modern malaise...
I have about..
10,000 tunes on my ipod! I know that I'll never listen to everything on it so I sometimes put on shuffle for a surprise! I found myself just filling it for no other reason than to fill it! When I realised that I stopped, and went back to listening to one thing all the way through! I did the same with sky+ when I first got it, recording all these programmes that, if I were to watch them, would just have to make watching tv my full-time job!!
Nah, I love it.
I spend far more time than is healthy searching, searching, searching. And, because I do a lot of driving, I either wallow in shuffle, or listen to the new before they join the shuffle. So it may take me days and weeks to go from 1 of xxx to the end, but one day, who knows, one day. (O, I delete stuff too!)
One benefit
of being a postman is three hours of Ipod a day. My main problem is deciding on podcasts or music.
Interesting
I now listen to speech on my iPod far more often than I listen to music. This could be because I walk four miles a day. This is not as much as you, I'm guessing, but it's a reasonable distance.
As I get older I find I increasingly share Will Self's obsession with walking and speech seems like the perfect accompaniment. I can't tell you how much I've learned in the last year while tramping around.
Speech v music
Yes, absolutely. Podcasts have actually encouraged me to take up running, just to have a half-hour to listen in regularly. But come on, Mr Hepworth - you still listen to a lot of music, obviously. Question is: when?
Me too
In fact, I have little more to add to Mr H. Walking with podcasts is the way forward.
Too Much Talking...
I've got a very specific fear of a digital snowfall of podcasts blocking me in my metaphorical mountain cabin. As they roll in off iTunes, the heart sinks as I click on the 'podcast' option on the iPod of a morning.
However, the hour in the car and the three hours on the Grantham -Kings X train has certainly chewed a big hole in the pile.
Exactly
"The heart sinks." My point exactly. When did listening to stuff become such a terrible burden?
RandomSpeech
Speech does seem to be winning out over music at the moment.I have about 2 days worth of podcasts playlisted on the iPod. Speech does seem to go better with a long walk, and like Mr H, God knows how much I've learned whilst walking about.
By the way a few saved Word podcasts always seem to make a delivery far more enjoyable than it should be. So thanks for that.
What voices to listen to?
So what are the good speech podcasts? Most of the ones I see are edited bits of Radio2 shows from folk I couldn't care less about. Apart from Word and Speechification where can I find intelligent and entertaining speech on planet pod?
In Our Time
Mervyn Bragg and highly intelligent guests mulling over an often impenetrable historical topic. Well worth a listen. From Five Live, you'll be needing the Mayo and Kermode film podcast and if you have the facilities for a video podcast, then the TED talks and Gresham College lectures are both excellent.
Start The Week
Start The Week's podcast is acetastic, and gives you faith that clever people will, one day, sort the world out. Adam and Joe's podcast digest is great, too, though one day they're going to have to add the music back in.
Skeptics Guide to the Universe
Truly excellent and funny discussion of scientific vs paranormal matters - essential listening!
This American Life
Try This American Life's podcast.Always varied, always interesting.
Real Time with Bill Maher is worth trying. It's an HBO current affairs debate show, hosted by comedian Bill Maher. Maher can grate a bit sometimes but the guests are usually pretty interesting.
From our own correspondent is always a good listen, as is Radio 4's film show.
I listened to a half hour show on how Malcolm X's personal documents, including his copy of the Koran, ended up on Ebay, this morning. Fascinating stuff, you can find it ( as well as loads of other great stuff) here
http://speechification.com/page/2/