May 10, 2003
Mining the Vaults
While I'm continuing my quest to rip my entire CD collection into MP3s I entered a rarely travelled portion of the collection tonight. It's the stuff that's always at the bottom of the rack and rarely listened to. Mostly rock compilation discs and a bunch of random discs that I picked up who knows where. Well, there is some killer stuff on these discs. In particular I discovered a totally obscure disc by Chris Burke called Idioglossia. I had no idea what was on this disc, but it is absolutely killer. It's very cool, very experimental, electronic music built almost entirely from samples. I've had this disc for years and I don't think I've ever listened to it.
Overall this is something that I love more then anything else about music on the computer. It puts all the music on an equal footing and all of it is at your finger tips. Random playlists and iTunes smart playlists that show all the tracks you've never listened to give you a view into the music that just isn't possible with a CD based collection. So far I've discovered so many incredible pieces in my collection that I had no idea were there.
I've always known I have a huge amount of music that I've never listened to, in fact I'm guessing I probably have at least 200 CDs that have never seen the inside of a CD player. Some are even still in the shrink wrap. For instance I own a copy of the Complete Mozart Edition. 180 CDs of everything that Mozart ever produced and while I've listened to large portions of it, there are a number of the opera boxes that I never bothered to open. I'm really looking forward to the day when all of that will be on the computer and it will be possible to explore any aspect of the music at any time without having to swap discs. In my opinion, this is the real revolution of music on the computer.