Tuesday 23 November 2004

Pic of the day: What this thing lacks is some way to make it beep so you can find it when it gets lost in the clutter.

Creative Zen

No, I am not talking about new uses for meditation, although you might have expected that from me. Rather, an instance of rampant consumerism. Sorry to disappoint those who look up to me as a spiritual lighthouse in this dark world. (Although it bears mention that lighthouses are there to be avoided, and anyone who steers straight at them will be in serious trouble...)

Today I bought a Creative Zen Micro MP3 player. Actually it plays WMA as well, and the guy at the shop heartily recommended that I convert any music to this format, which takes up less space and gives a sound quality indistinguishable from the CD. Personally, though, I don't think space will be a constraint. 5 GB may not be all that much, but we're talking music here, not video.

I only have a few hundred CDs, and most of these only have a couple songs worth hearing. (Some have none worth hearing again, although I did not find that out until later.) The main exception being anything by Enya, Leonard Cohen and Chris de Burgh, roughly in that order. These tend to fill their CDs entirely or nearly so with worthwhile songs, although not all of the songs on each CD go well together or fit for the same occasion.

The player was plain white with metal colored front. (It is also available in 9 other attractive colors in addition to this drab one.) It is rather smaller than I had expected, and (the plain white one) unlikely to attract much attention. It looks most of all like a small computer mouse. If I turn it over it will probably be safe on my office desk while I am away, indistinguishable from the general clutter there. I know it is not as pretty as an iPod. This is a conscious choice: I don't want the player to evoke emotions, I want the music to do that. If I wanted clothes or jewelry, there are shops for that.

Which brings us to the touchy topic of spending my limited wealth on such things. Well, the price has come down quite a bit, and I expect that it won't go much further (except what comes from a slowly sinking dollar). The new generation of players are already out, they show photos as well as play sound, and the first video versions are coming to the marketplace. Rather than ever lower prices, you get ever more features. So this is the natural time for me to get into the market, if I want to. And I do. I have used my Pocket PC as an MP3 player for a while, but it has limited capacity and it is not really the intended use for that device. The Zen will enable me to carry around with me pretty much my entire CD collection, or at least those tracks I want to hear ever again. The penultimate liberation of music from matter. (The ultimate will be when you can have any music you want beamed directly to a receiver in your inner ear, and music will be as omnipresent as the air we breathe. I wonder if I shall live to see that time. I do remember the transition from tape recorders to cassette recorders though, in fact I still have a tape recorder standing under my table here, so who knows?)

Speaking of touchy, the touch control on the Zen takes some getting used to. I have set it to low sensitivity, but I still tend to make incorrect selections because my fingers are not used to sliding through menus by moving up and down the touch sensitive bar in the middle of the control panel. It gets better over time, though, as I learn to not take my fingers off until I find the right place. I am used to the touch screen of the Pocket PC, so seeing menus and not being able to touch them directly is kinda frustrating.

I am almost surprised by how small a day in my life this is. I think, at some point in the past, I had expected it to be a defining event or something. But in the meantime, these kind of things have become so much part of life that it was more like getting my own telephone, something to be expected rather than an experience.

The first tracks I transferred were all Japanese pop songs, of course. ^_^* Then Enya, whose CD Shepherd Moons serves as inspiration for the novel I am currently failing to write while I am writing this. And then Chris de Burgh's Quiet Revolution and The Love Songs, not unexpectedly since I am writing a quasi-NewAge romance novel.

And that was that, really. The shop guy at the Shop of Angels also recommended that I play the massive multiplayer game World of Warcraft, but I have not done so and probably won't. If it is not as good as City of Heroes, why would I pay for it? And it if is better, when would I work? (In fact, some of my best online friends are playing WoW already at a time when I ought to sleep, which does not exactly help the case.) But at least now I can listen to my favorite music on the way to work. That's something, even if I can't play online computer games on the bus. Yet.