Dotoar

(I'm more sane now so that alone will severely affect my postings from here on)

So, this 'digital revolution' as they call it, with all the home-made pros-and-cons-arguments about its influence on the duplication of multimedia files; is it justified? Wrong question, says I. One should ask: Is it wrong? Nay, says I, and I've written a truckload and a half about the subject elsewhere and may just as well do it again here some day. Not now though; I'm in a reminiscing mood right now, yearning for ghosts of file transfers past and an environment that in hindsight was a very unhealthy place for anyone who finally had learned to expand his (her?) views on musical alleys alongside the information highway. In order to set the right mood for this period of time, loosely spun around my senior high years (I believe that's the adequate english equivalent of the swedish school system), I'll take the liberty of beginning the journey with one of the records that happened to constitute the backdrop back then:



I'm not that old, but I am old enough to have been young when there was no such thing as a computerized music collection and way up to the late 90's I still had to save money for an occasional raid to the record store in order to satisfy my completion needs of Beatles, Who, Doors, Kinks, Hendrix and so on. This, in combination with the absence of information access that comes with an internet-less territory (did you know that by the mid-00's, half of all the stored information in the world had supervened in only three years?), led to a rather limited scope of knowledge about music and the musical preferences that had sprung out of the acknowledgement of 60's-related bands, not to mention the fear of the brash 70's and the post-Tommy Who material. That was not to happen until halfway through my senior high years.

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In order to grasp the scarce multimedial situation in the mid-90's in general, and for me in particular, I feel I've gotta draw a vague timeline to which my computer conditions are nailed. I got my first PC in around 1995 or so, a 486 equipped with a whole 4 MB working memory, DOS 6.2, Windows 3.11, no internet connection and no sound card which meant that whatever game I was playing that yielded any kind of sound effects had to be channeled through the PC squeaker, sorry, speaker. Naturally, digital music listening wasn't even present on the map. It took a good couple of years before I acquired an internet subscription with a then top-of-the-line 56K modem (I even remember having to replace the original chip in it with the upgraded one when I first installed the whole package) and up until then I had to rely on a slightly more updated friend's workstation whenever I felt the urge of scanning through the net for Beatles chords, which was basically the only thing on internet I found useful back then. Now, all of a sudden, I could do it all by myself at home whenever I wanted to! Sort of, at least, because I was only granted about an hour a day past 6 PM when the phone fee was lower, and with an already obsolete and painfully overclocked 486 burdened with the brand new Win 95, you can guess the amount of effective time that was spent entirely on loading all the dubious Geocities pages. I even had to turn off all image viewing in the browser to have a chance of getting a peek of the tricky chord changes of "I am the walrus" and "Martha my dear". And additional information about Beatles was all extra.

I remember the first time I stumbled upon the conception of having actual songs stored on the drive in compressed form, which at the time was through the mp2 format. A friend had somehow got hold on "All you need is love" (not that he or any of my other friends really liked the Beatles that much, it was more like me shoving it down their throats) and Monty Python's "Lumberjack" in mp2. Crappy as hell of course and nothing that would ever threaten the trusty old CD stereo, but nonetheless amazing, and we had heard of a new upcoming format that would be thoroughly improved in both compression and sound quality, called "mp3". Remember that this was just another file format and little did we know that it would turn out to be a world standard phenomenom in its own rights, giving name to both portable media players as well as copyright battles and for quite a while whenever one talked about such thing as compressed audio files, one could as well mean mp2 as mp3.

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And then nothing in particular happened. At least not until the mid-90's turned into the late 90's, and junior high turned into senior high where every student on my school each got a laptop for supposedly educational use. Also, the school had a freshly installed network with internet access which of course was nothing short of a small revolution on our (the students) part as the mp3 format by the time had stabilized itself as the equivalent to music files (apart from a weird *.ogg format in which a friend had come over "Pulse" by Pink Floyd and which required an even weirder media player with unreadable graphics called "Kö-fjol" or something, which at least sounds amusing in swedish). Anyway, this was still way before Napster, Kazaa, DC and Soulseek so the mp3 distribution was dubious, not seldom handled through FTP servers by shady demi-gurus kind enough to share them, and the overall supply was scarce. This was a time where "mp3" meant "mp3" and not "your momentarily desired song by any artist ever", and thus each file was a treasure. I even remember ripping selected tracks off my CD's onto the laptop (with a little help from a friend, since I didn't have a CD-rom player) just to increase my mp3 library on it. I never listened to them that way, of course; that would be stupid since I had the records anyway.

I wasn't nearly as enthusiastic over the mp3 craze as some of my classmates. One of them made it his mission to hunt down every single mp3 file he could find, download them and burn them onto CD's only to archive them on the shelf. I remember lending him my entire record collection in order for him to rip and burn and thus adding to his ever-growing mp3 library. I on the other hand, did handpick only what I was remotely interested in at the time which resulted in - at best - a handful of tracks by bands I only just had begun to gain an interest in and I still have a CD with a painfully put together collection of assorted mp3 crusts in true vintage fashion, peaking at 128 kbps and with an occasional error blurp. Once again, I had a friend whose dad had acquired a CD burner in his work computer and just for the sake of it, we burned just about anything we could get our hands on, including "The wall" by Floyd, "Isola" by Kent and said mixtape CD containing just about every hard-earned mp3 file I had mined during the goldrush, including a couple of tracks called "Kashmir" and "Whole lotta love" and a copy of an album my friend happened to have lying around on his harddrive; "Deep Purple in rock".

I was still not going to switch my listening habits from records to WinAmp for years to come, but this twilight zone that took place towards the turn of the century was about to expand my horizons from the long-haired 60's to the even longer-haired 70's, and in the process, harden up the aural texture.

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