I don't know if there was a solar flare recently or what, but this morning I woke up to discover my mp3 player was dead. Dead dead, as in the hard drive made the infamous click of death sound (and trust me, as a guy with 11½ years in the tech support trenches, it's called the click of death for a reason). So, I suffered through a Phil Collins CD on the drive in to work this morning. Not that I mind Phil Collins, but I had queued up several Tori Amos albums and was looking forward to working through that list... well, you can understand my dilemma.
The demise of this player didn't come as a complete surprise. A few days ago I noticed some pauses in the playback, just long enough to throw the beat off. Everything worked fine after shutting the player down and starting it up again so I assumed it was a glitch. I guess that was probably the first sign of the problem, though.
I liked that old mp3 player. Big, angular, and funky, it had 60 GB of storage space — over half of that was filled. Theoretically it could play videos, show pictures, and do all kinds of other things. Once upon a time I stumbled across a calendar or organizer of some sort on it, but it wasn't very functional. All I ever cared about was the music.
Yes, I have a backup. Trust me, as a guy with 11½ years in the tech support trenches, I have a backup.
I will add that this was Arnold's player before it was mine. When I inherited this thing it had mostly bluegrass music on it, quite a few pictures, and one recording of him saying, "Test, test, test. Can everybody hear me alright?" I backed all that up too (of course) and filled it with stuff more in line with my tastes. The backup is still around, information outlasting the physical's inevitable decline and failure.
This evening, as an experiment, I resurrected my old Nokia E71x phone, stuck a memory card in it, and loaded up Steven Wilson's "Grace For Drowning". It played just fine, of course. The memory card is only 4 GB, and I need to dig up a 2.5mm to 3.5mm audio adapter, but I think it will serve the purpose. I'm going to miss being able to drag tons and tons of albums around at a time, but
- you still listen to them one at a time anyway, and
- if having "only" a hundred or so albums in my pocket is a problem, I've got it pretty good.