Auxiliary Memory

My Music DNA: The FM Years

Until I wrote My Music DNA: The AM Era I never thought about how my life has been one long experiment with technology. We like to think personal technology started with personal computers, or for some people, the iPod, iPhone or iPad, but now that I contemplate the topic, I realize The Gadget Age started in the 19th century with photography, then the phonograph, movie camera and radio. Before gadgets if you wanted to hear music you had to go where the musicians were performing. If you wanted to see Paris you had to go to France.

Gadgets bring the world to us, whether it’s voice, music, images or movies. To a degree, books and paintings are proto-gadgets, they bring distant words and images to us created by people, but gadgets bring snapshots of reality, whether it’s images (photography), voice and music (phonograph, radio) or movies (film and television). A personal computer or iPad are dazzling devices because not only can they bring us voice, music, images and movies, they can process these media like a word processer processes words.

Although FM radio was patented in 1933, first broadcasts weren’t made until 1939, and stereo not added until the late 1950s, I didn’t get my first FM radio until 1968. FM radio took a long time to catch on. If you look at the Fidelity Potential Index Table you will see how sound recordings have evolved since the invention of the wax cylinder. FM music has more fidelity than the 78 and 45, but not as much as the LP. I had already started buying 45s and LPs before I got my first FM radio. My first FM radio came in a small console stereo I bought in 1968 from the Columbia Record Club, when I was 16. It was my first installment plan purchase. I don’t have a photo of my first console stereo, but it looked something like this.

Working as paperboy, cutting lawns, babysitting, and eventually as a bagboy didn’t not pay enough to buy all the music I wanted to hear, so my FM radio was a magical piece of technology. AM radio was all about hit singles, whereas FM was about albums. FM radio took me out of the teeny-bopper tunes and introduced me to a more mature level of album oriented music.

Among the albums I discovered back in 1968 on my FM radio was Truth by Jeff Beck, which I immediately bought. I was transitioning from AM radio to FM and I discovered new groups like Cream, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, Steve Miller, Grateful Dead, etc. I also got into the albums of artists I had discovered on the AM airwaves like The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Mamas and The Pappas.

I remember friends coming over in 1968 to hear the FM radio for the first time and being blown away – it was that different from AM.

My FM years didn’t last long, from 1968-1972. It was transitional technology. FM brought me a wide range of music from around the world, but it was a broadcast technology. I started buying LPs in the AM era, and by 1970 I had about 300 albums, but they were never enough. FM radio was my music news and how I discovered new music until I couldn’t handle the disc jockeys. At first, back in the 1960s, FM was considered underground music, but FM took over the hit parade as more people got FM receivers. At a certain point disc jockeys became so annoying I gave up FM and AM radio.

In 1969 I started getting my music news from The Rolling Stone magazine. For a brief while in the late 70s and early 80s I returned to FM to listen to WEVL, a volunteer radio station where music fans hosted music shows rather than professional disc jockeys. But for the most part I gave up radio listening in the 1970s. I became a album buying addict, buying over a thousand LPs before I switched to buying CDs in the 1980s, and I went on to buy 1,500 CDs before I phased into streaming music in recent years.

AM radio showcased top hits that were played frequently. AM hits of the 1960s provide the core music that Baby Boomers share. On any given day you could hear about 40-60 different songs.

FM radio offered a far larger range of music and styles until it was hijacked by the Top 40 format and became zany entertainment for automobile drivers. In the early days of FM if you tried hard enough you could hear 100-200 different songs in a day.

Buying LPs offered the choice of thousands of albums at better stores. And LPs allowed fans to own music, another kind of enabling technology.

With Internet shopping, collectors could buy a million CDs if they could afford it – then the MP3 revolution hit, and collectors could steal those million albums if they had the time, bandwidth and lack of ethics. Now with steaming music anyone can have easy access to over a million albums, or about 15-20 million songs for $9.99 a month.

iTunes and iPod reinvented the hit singles and almost killed the album. Streaming music is like combining FM and owning LPs with renting music, and it promotes the album.

FM radio still exists, as does AM radio and even LPs, but they are waning technologies that have been supplanted by the Internet. FM radio was a stepping stone technology that expanded the world of music over AM. FM radio is now a trailing technology – it fits a niche market, and has many competitors like Sirius Radio, a paid service, or Pandora Radio, free and paid, that offers music from a very wide selection of albums, and is a far superior to broadcast technology. Broadcast radio itself is a waning technology, even with HD Radio.

Streaming music offers the greatest selection and control – with instant access to most of the albums in print.

Strangely enough, it’s very hard for me to remember FM songs that I loved because of listening to the radio, versus songs from the same time period that I bought on LPs. The way I’ve discovered how to tell the difference is to listen to Play Cofi Jukebox at tropicalglen.com by the years below. The songs I loved but never bought are songs I can give thanks to FM radio technology. What’s surprising is just how many of those songs there were. Just click on a link and listen. How many of the songs did you buy, and how many are part of your memories because you listened to FM radio?

1968 – 1969 – 1970 – 1971 – 1972

It’s strange to think that young people today may never have listened to an AM or FM radio, or bought a LP or CD. But I wonder, just what kind of technologies will supplant streaming music? Combining streaming music with a smartphone is about as close to thinking of a song and hearing it instantly telepathically as one can get. Will they ever invent brain transceivers that stimulate the neurons directly, and just bypass the ears? It’s just amazing to think of all the technological change in one lifetime.

But you know what? There’s one constant that doesn’t change. That’s listening to music.

JWH – 2/21/12

My Music DNA: The AM Radio Era

In an age of gadget addiction I look back and realize my first AM radio was my first personal gadget that changed my life. TV will always be the gadget that raised us baby boomers to see the world, but it was a family gadget. For me, it was a white clock radio I got for Christmas in 1962 that was my first in a long line of personal gadgets. Sadly, I don’t have a photo of my much loved radio, but this one will do to inspire these words.

How do we become the people we grow up to be? The other night I watched Transcendent Man, a documentary on Ray Kurzweil on Netflix streaming. Kurzweil is an inventor and visionary who hopes to live long enough for medical science to discover immortality, but he also loved his deceased father dearly, and wants to recreate his dad’s personality in a computer. Kurzweil’s assumption is if he could program a computer with everything his father was interested in, he could create an artificial being that has his father’s personality. I think a lot about artificial intelligence and I’ve long wondered what programs our personality. Are we the sum of our likes, loves and dislikes and hates?

The other day I told a friend at work that the music of the 1960s defined me. She objected to the term “defined” but I couldn’t think of a better one. If I tried to program a robot to act like me it would require figuring out how to program a love for the same music I love. I don’t think that’s possible, but then how did it happen in the first place, with me? How was I programmed to love the music that I do? What are my music genes?

Some people are very sentimental about music. Think about weddings and funerals and how we select songs that define us. There’s that word again. But we don’t play our favorite TV shows at our funerals, but songs we love. Some couples mark falling in love with songs. And what would movies be without songs to enhance our emotions? Baby Boomers are very different except that most of us feel tied together by the music we shared growing up in the 1960s.

One reason I’m writing this is to remember. Figuring out the answers to these questions helps me remember. Writing about the past involves spelunking into the deepest caverns of my mind. My first memories of music was from the 1950s, listening to songs on my dad’s 1955 Pontiac car radio. Right from the start my Dad hated the pop music I was unconsciously drawn to. But it wasn’t until I got that clock radio for Christmas, when I was 11, that the songs started burning into my memory. My AM radio, with a tiny 3” speaker, was one of the most transformative gadgets of my life. I wished I had a photo of it sitting in all the rooms I lived in during the years I owned it. What a shame. That’s another article to write: what I wished I had photographed when growing up.

From the end of 1962 until through 1967 that AM radio programmed the musical foundation of my life. I got the radio when I was living on Maine Avenue at Homestead Air Force Base. I was in the 6th grade at Air Base Elementary. I started 7th grade a Redlands Jr. High in September 1963, We then moved back to our house in Hollywood, Florida probably late October, where I attended Broward Jr. High until just after JFK was killed, when we moved to New Ellington, South Carolina, for the rest of the 7th grade and part of the 8th at John F. Kennedy Jr. High. Then back to Leisure City near Homestead, where I spent the 8th grade going to Homestead Junior High, and then we moved to Cutler Ridge, where I went to the 9th grade at Cutler Ridge Jr. High. I graduated Jr. High in 1966, the summer they started advertising Star Trek. By the time the show premiered we had moved to Charleston, Mississippi for the first half of the 10th grade at East Tallahatchie High School, and then in March of 1967 we moved to Coconut Grove, Florida where I finished the 10th grade at Coral Gables High School and started the 11th. This is was 1967 and 1968. It was around the end of 1967 that my white AM radio died. In 1968 I bought a small console stereo with AM/FM radio, and that began my FM years I’ll write about in the future.

Through the magic of Rdio I’ve been assembling playlists for the songs that are etched in my synapses, making groovy grooves in my gray matter. I played my radio whenever I wasn’t in school, and I even slept with the radio playing. Is it any wonder that I imprinted on those songs. I can even remember the radio stations I listened to when we lived in South Florida, WQAM and WFUN.

If you wish to listen to these songs, sign up for the free membership to Rdio and play these playlists. You can view the lists without joining, but it doesn’t take much effort to set up a free account.

1962 – 1963 – 1964 – 1965 – 1966 – 1967

Would I have been a different person if I had played different music for those five years? What if I had gotten into jazz or classical music? Would different music made a different Jim Harris? Wouldn’t it be a fascinating experiment if we could raise ourselves over and over again, traveling back in time to our birthday to be born in a different country and culture. Then compare how much of our personality stays the same and how much is differs? If I had been born in China and immigrated to the US in the 1990s, would I eventually discover that I loved these songs on these 6 playlists?

I don’t think I’d love the music same way if I did. There’s something about absorbing the pop culture around you when you go through puberty – that stuff sticks to you for the rest of your life. 1962-1967 seems very clear in my memories, while the rest of my life is a blur.

To illustrate how precise my memories are from this time, is how attuned I am to the sound of the original recordings. When building my playlists I could tell almost immediately when a song was the original, or if it was a recreation, or even if it had been re-mastered tune. I don’t mind some sonic improvements but I hate major changes. Remember, I first heard this music in mono. I usually don’t mind the stereo versions, but the re-mastering that messes with the sound levels, even when it makes the instruments stand out clearer, bothers me. And I just hate when artists re-record their hits. I know it’s because they lost the rights to the originals, but I want to hear what I heard over my white AM radio from late 1962 to late 1967.

The soundtrack for the film Pirate Radio re-mastered many classics, compressing the sound to modernize the feel of the songs because modern songs are much louder than oldies. I can handle this to a degree, but it makes me want a 60s AM filter to change the sound back. It’s not quite the same, but it’s somewhat like colorizing old black and white movies.

A lot of songs are missing from these playlists – songs I’ve forgotten, songs that everyone has forgotten and gone out of print, songs out of copyright, songs from The Beatles and other butthead artists that refuse to let their music play from streaming music services. And there’s another group of missing songs, those I learned later to love, like folk music and jazz from that era that I didn’t learn about until after I switched to FM and LPs.

Also, there’s the problem that Rdio just doesn’t have all the songs it could. For example, “Half Heaven, Half Heartache” by Gene Pitney is available from Rhapsody but not Rdio. This is why I pay $9.99 a month to two streaming music services.

Finally, there’s the problem of my memory. Even with national playlists I can’t remember all the songs I used to love because many songs were local or regional hits. For example, in Miami back in 1963, my sister and I loved a song called “The Lone Teen Ranger” that I never heard again for decades. I later I learned on the Internet this was Paul Simon singing as Jerry Landis. But there are so many songs like this that I haven’t heard for decades that are still lost in the darks corners of my mind.

There’s a wonderful internet radio called Playa Cofi Jukebox that lets you play songs by years 1950-1989. Nothing is required to play the music, and if you pick a year, you’ll get a link to the weekly record charts – for example here’s December 22, 1962, around the time I got my radio. By the way, this goes to show you a flaw in my playlists. Songs on 1963 have songs that first appeared in 1962. If I was anal I’d remake the lists by absolute release dates.

The other night on the Grammys Maroon 5 and Foster the People sang two Beach Boys songs as a 50 Year Tribute. Are songs from my youth still turning on young people after all these years? I have no idea what these songs sound like without the nostalgia speakers I always hear them through. Do they sound funny and quaint, or could they actually appeal to an eleven year old in 2012?

JWH – 2/20/12 (50th Anniversary of John Glenn’s flight into space)

24-bit FLAC Crash and Burn

After listening to a video interview with Neil Young tell us music lovers who listen to MP3 files we’re settling for 5% of music data from a studio master I wrote The Quest for the Highest Fidelity. Since then I’ve been experimenting with 24-bit FLAC files to see if I could hear the stuff I’m missing. I downloaded a copy of Fubar2000 to play FLAC files and then downloaded a selection of sample FLAC files from 2l.no. I did not notice a dramatic 20 times better sound quality from having 100% of the music data. I couldn’t even tell if it was 5% better.

The big question is why not? Some possible answers are:

My ears aren’t good enough (60 years old)
My PC speakers aren’t good enough (Kliptsch THX 2.1)
My PC audio isn’t good enough (RealTek HD Audio)
I don’t have things set up right
I don’t have auditory skills to notice a big difference
I don’t have all the various components working together properly

If I had $10-20,000 in audio gear I might notice a significant difference but I’m not going to spend the money to find out. But even if had the money and was willing to spend it, I think I’d need a degree in audio engineering to set up the system. There are damn few books about setting up high definition digital audio, and not that much on the Internet either. My Realtek HD audio supports playing 24-bit 96kHz and 192kHz files, and I download FLAC files of each type, and damn if I can tell any difference. I could tell a slight difference between the 24-bit FLAC and the streaming MP3 music.

And even if the sound was dramatically better, would I really switch to buying $25 albums? A terabyte hard drive would hold about 100 albums, which would be $2500. I get a million albums for $10 a month from Rdio, and they sound great. But then I’m happy eating beans and rice.

I suppose if I was a rich dude living in a big house and had lots of money to burn, I’d build a room for high definition audio, and a RAID NAS with many terabytes of free space, assemble a high end stereo system and collect 24-bit FLAC files, but I doubt I’ll ever be a rich dude.

But you know what? I recently created a playlist of 1963 songs on Rdio and played them through Roku box connected to my $400 Pioneer amp, with a pair of Infinity floor standing speakers and cranked up the volume, and that was the best I ever heard those songs since 1963. Neil, I might be missing 95% of the music data, but the 5% I had sounded great.

Even on my PC, if I crank up the volume, the songs sound way better than when I first heard them on a clock AM radio with a single 3” inch speaker.

Streaming MP3 music is just too damn convenient. This experiment is over.

JWH – 2/15/12

Dear Amazon, Please Create These Features for My Kindles

Now that I’m slowly becoming Kindlelized I realize I might be reading on a Kindle for the rest of my life, at least if Amazon keeps marketing their ereaders by that name. Evolutionary steps in the Kindle technology have made reading much easier than book reading, especially now that I’m older with bad eyesight. However, the Kindle is far from perfect, and I’d like to make a few suggestions Mr. Bezos for future features I’d like to use.

If I’m switching to ebooks then I want a library for my ebooks. So far Kindles are more like a box for books, not even a bookshelf, and what I need for a lifetime of ebook collecting is a personal electronic library system.

Kindle Cloud Library and Librarian

Once I got a couple dozen books and magazines on my Kindle the interface became annoying and clumsy. I now read my Kindle books on my Kindle 3, iPad 2, iPod touch, PC and Mac. My wife owns a Kindle Touch and I’m going to buy one too, and I plan to get a Fire when version 2 comes out. I also have Calibre on my PC, and Send to Kindle extension for Chrome on all my computers. And even though the Kindle environment keeps up where I left off in any book despite what device I read on, not all content is available on every device or reader program.

My first request is for a Kindle Library in the Amazon Cloud. I want one location to keep all books, magazines and documents that will be permanent. By permanent, I mean the rest of my life. I want to leave my library in my will.

I want one location to keep clean and organized. I want one location where I can file and organize my library. I want to be able to list by author, title, subject and collection. I’d also like to list by year published, date acquired, books read, books unread, books I want to read, etc.

Once I start getting thousands of documents this will become very important.

I want all my devices to check out books from a single Kindle Cloud Library. Then when I’m finish reading, I want to clear the book from the device, or even from all devices automatically. I want to manage one library in the cloud rather than libraries on every device and reader program.

I want to upload my personal documents to the Kindle Cloud Library in addition to sending them to my Kindle email address.

I want a cataloging system too, something simple like the Dewey Decimal system. Library of Congress is too complicated.

I also want tools for managing my library like a database. It would be a huge plus if it integrated with LibraryThing or GoodReads, and I could export data to a spreadsheet or database for making printed reports.

It would also be great Mr. Bezos if my Kindle Cloud Library integrated with Evernote.

Kindle Special Collections File Folders

I don’t care how Amazon stores my ebooks and audiobooks, but I want a section of my cloud library for documents I create that works like Dropbox. I want to be able to organize my documents into folders and subfolders. It would also be useful to have a tool that converts documents that I want to keep permanently in my library to Kindle’s ebook format, but I want to store Word and Acrobat files too, as well as jpeg photos. And hey, get rid of DRM and work out a world-wide universal ebook format that will last forever.

Kindle Library Card

I hate the fact that my wife can’t read my Kindle books. I suppose we could swap Kindles, but that’s messy. I suppose we could share one account, but that’s messy too. I want my own library, and I want her to have her own library, but I want to be able to borrow each other’s books.

We need to have a library checkout system for family members. Spouses and children should have unlimited access to family libraries. We should also have limited check-out privileges for friends and extended family.

Kindle Interlibrary Loan and Bookstore

When I search for a book in my library I want to know if I own it first. Then, I want to know if there are public domain editions I can add to my library. Then I want to know if there are library copies available, either from my public library or from Amazon Prime. Finally, I want to be told what copies are available for sale.

Kindle Multimedia Library

Because Amazon also owns Audible.com where I buy my audio books, and I have my music stored in the Amazon Cloud, I’d like to be able to integrate these media into my Kindle Library Cloud. The Fire is moving towards this now, but I want all my Kindle devices and readers to read all the various kinds of content in my library. I want my librarian management software to work with all media.

I’d also like to be able to add audiobooks I’ve ripped from CDs to my Kindle Cloud Library. Ditto for tape audiobooks I’ve converted to MP3s.

Remove from Collection

I also want a way to remove content from my collection. Whether this is a permanent deletion or shelving in hidden stacks I don’t care.

Kindle Book Match

Now I don’t know if this last request is even possible, but I’m going to ask. I know some people will never cotton to ebooks, and many people will always want to collect physical books. I’d like some kind of system like iTunes Music Match where I turn in my physical books and get ebooks added to my library. I just don’t want to buy books twice like I did with albums when I bought many CDs that I already owned on LPs. Since Amazon is in the used book business maybe it would take physical books in trade for ebook editions.

JWH – 2/14/12

Living in the Cloud: Google Music, Amazon Cloud and iTunes Match

I have over 18,000 songs ripped from CDs I’ve been buying since 1983 or 1984. It was a big project to rip them, and I bought a couple external hard drives to back up my work. One of those drives stopped working recently, and it’s a pain to keep master library and backups in sync, especially since I keep one drive off site. In fact, I gave up on keeping my collection and backups in sync. So when cloud music storage came out I thought wow, this is a great idea.

The first service I tried was Google Music since it was free. It has an upload app that runs as a background service and I spent a couple weeks getting my collection online. I mainly listen to music at my home office computer, my work office computer, and in the den with a HTPC hooked up to my stereo system. I have an iPad and iPod touch, but I don’t like listening to music on those devices. I just don’t like hearing music through earbuds.

I did test Google music out on my iPad and strangely enough the album listings look best on the iPad. Google Music looks bad on large screen desktop monitors because I think the album thumbnail images are optimized for phones and tablets. Their web player has basic controls for play/pause, next, previous, repeat and shuffle – nothing fancy but gets the job done.

Here is the album view. You can blow up all images by clicking on them.

Here is what it looks like to play an album – the controls are along the bottom.

Then I uploaded my music to Amazon Cloud. It also took a couple weeks, but it was a web app that kept crashing. Also, Amazon’s upload app found all my audio books and uploaded them. I really didn’t want it to do that, but it did. I already had 20gb of storage at Amazon’s cloud because I had bought an album on promotion, and Amazon recently gave unlimited music upload space to anyone with 20gb of space or more. When the renewal comes up, storing my music on Amazon Cloud will be $20 a year. Here’s the album view for the Amazon Cloud player.

Notice the album covers are nicer looking. Here’s what the album player looks like. The same basic controls as Google Music.

iTunes Music Match works different. It works through iTunes – which I hate. I was hoping it would have a web client too, but it doesn’t. So I can’t play music on my Linux machines. Nor do I want to install iTunes on all my machines. And for some strange reason iTunes in album view iTunes sorts by artist, so I couldn’t recreate the album images like I did with Google Music and Amazon Cloud.

Here’s the player view.

Because iTunes Music Match costs $25 a year, and it’s from Apple, which has a reputation for style and slickness, I thought I would like it best. I didn’t. I like it least because it’s tied to iTunes. The music match feature worked beautifully, and within minutes 15,000 of my albums were online. It took two days to upload 3,350 unmatched albums. This is a more sophisticated way to get albums into the cloud, but playing them is limited to machines with iTunes.

Another strange thing about iTunes is it did the poorest job of finding album covers. Apple is so visual that I found this disappointing. I have spent a lot of extra time trying to find the covers and put them into iTunes so I can enjoy album flow viewing, but I gave up somewhere in the D’s. Now there’s a company that fixes this problem with a program called Tune-Up. However, it’s expensive. $39.95 per year, or $49.95 for a lifetime license. It annoys me so much not having the artwork that I am tempted to spend the money, but I’ve decided that I just don’t like iTunes Music Match if I have to use iTunes.

Finally, iTunes plays music differently. Google and Amazon streams from the cloud. No internet, no music. iTunes lets you download songs from the cloud. The others do too, but iTunes seems to emphasize download. You can have up to 10 devices sharing your Music Match cloud library, but what appears to happen is the music gets downloaded to each new device. You can tell your satellite devices to intentionally download the music so you can play it offline, and this will be a great feature for most people who use iPhones and iPads. However, it will fill up your device with music. I prefer streaming.

As far as I was concerned iTunes Music Match was $25 down the drain. However, Mac users who own Mac, iPhone and iPad will always have iTunes and so Music Match will be worth it to them. iTunes Music Match seems geared to iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users, to help on-the-go users get music down from the cloud.

Now I have to decide between Google and Amazon. Because I’m a dedicated Chrome user I’m partial to Google. Because I’m a dedicated Amazon customer, I’m equally partial to Amazon. I’m leaning towards the Amazon cloud because the player looks better. However, it will cost me $20 a year. I’m going to maintain both for now, or until I see what Google charges. I’m an Amazon Prime user, so I wish they’d made unlimited music storage free for Prime members.

My next project is to thin out my collection. I’m not sure how well Google and Amazon update their clouds. I want to make one perfect copy of my library in Windows Media Player and hopefully Amazon and Google will keep this master library in sync. Another test will be to download my collection to my work machine to see how well these clouds can be used as backup to restore my collection. But these are for future reports because it will take months to do all this.

JWH – 2/12/12