The times they are a changin'

An article by the Washington Post (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6962426/) claims that CDs will eventually go the way of the LP, 8-track, and cassette. Downloading music via the internet is on the rise, Ipods are flying off the shelves, and "no format" music is likely in our future.

Sure, I can see this happening. I'm a music lover. But how many CDs do I own now? Hmm, probably about 5, and they are all computer-burned mixes either I or someone else has made (otherwise, the used CDs would have probably ended up on e-bay by now). Somewhere in the closet I still have a box of record albums, and there are hundreds of cassettes lying around in storage. We do have 2 MP3 players that we use to listen to audiobooks, but they're pretty small in storage (64MB) compared to these 20 GB monster models now on the market.

A few years ago, Brad bought me a MiniDisc player for Christmas (pictured above). The technology for MiniDiscs isn't exactly new, but this format is well-suited for our purposes. A MiniDisc is like a small CD enclosed in a hard plastic shell (which prevents it from being scratched). They are said to be rewriteable up to 1,000,000 times, and can hold up to 5 hours of music (though I've been told there is a newer MiniDisc format which now holds a lot more).

Over the last few years, I made the decision that I am no longer going to try to keep up with the ever-changing formats of music on the market. I'm going to stick with MiniDisc, though I'm sure one day it will probably be an antique in its own right. Everything I've had has been slowly being changed over to the MiniDisc format, including the aforementioned record albums, cassettes, CDs, and well, if I still had 8-tracks, I'd copy them too. MiniDiscs can also be used to record voice or music with microphones (reporters tend to use them a lot professionally), as well as downloaded MP3s, and capturing streaming audio across the net with the right equipment. I still think it's the most versatile format out there right now, at least for our purposes. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I like having some kind of disc in my hand, something tangible. And for those folks who have 10,000 songs on their Ipod, I sure hope you have some kind of backup. If something ever happened to the MP3 player, that kind of loss would be catastrophic to a music lover.