In the old days in the mid to late 90s when we were still using portable CD players, I had a CD wallet alongside the player in my haversack. I was commuting from Yio Chu Kang station where home was to Raffles City station where I was working, and that was 2 hours of traveling and music-listening everyday. That combo weighed close to a kilogram I think.
These days things are all miniaturized. Ling first got me a Samsung MP3 player for my birthday 3 years ago. That was a great nifty little device. Fantastic sound, but awful, awful battery life. You exhausted the poor thing in about 4 hours, shorter than a flight from Singapore to Perth. It didn’t take long for me to change to a cheap Meizu Chinese player with surprisingly good sound but awful storage space of just 2 GB.
The Meizu M6 was my traveling companion for 18 months that I brought with me in all of our vacations overseas. Recently though I started searching online a fortnight ago to look for its replacement. I finally settled on a comparatively non-mass market Cowon D2. Yeah you haven’t heard of this player before eh. It’s a fan favorite. And it’s a wonder why when there are gems like these people still buy iPods which are over-priced, over-hyped, suffer awful battery life (lest their most recent models) and worse of all, mediocre audio quality.
Anyway the Cowon D2 has 16 GB built-in. For those of us who’re not an audiophile geek, 16 GB stores about 200 CDs of music. And if that’s not enough (my classics collection number around 700 albums now and at third of those are multi-CDs between 2 to 12 discs), there’s a SD memory card slot for one to fill up.
A site that I’ve just started subscribing to too is eMusic, which boasts of a huge online classical music catalog. The site doesn’t carry albums from the ‘premium’ classical music labels like Deutsche Grammophone or Decca, but there’s still an amazing collection of albums at a low asking price of around USD0.25 per music track. I’ve been browsing through the catalog at home for alternate recordings of some of my favorite compositions, e.g. Haydn’s twelve London and six Paris Symphonies, wind concerti by Mozart. There’s also several other interesting and almost unique recordings, e.g. English recordings of Mozart’s operas.
The eMusic service also has some really interesting subscription options. Specifically, they charge flat subscription fees for a fixed number of track purchases which resets every month. So, in theory, you could subscribe to a USD49.95 plan that allows you to pick up 200 tracks a month, and over time download every classical music CD you’ll want to listen to.
So it’s been music nirvana for me since I started subscribing. Bach wrote 250 cantatas, which if you were to buy off the shelf amounts to maybe one hundred CD albums. But I can now finally buy them in MP3 form… even if it’ll take me one year to finish getting them all haha! Not that I’ll ever want to though; I’m really interested only in a select few of his cantatas, thankfully.
Unfortunately, there really aren’t very many classical music listeners around me. In fact, of all the friends I’ve had over the years, there’s been perhaps just one friend I know who was also a classical music listener and shared my passion for it. None of say my small group friends over the years have, though two did have an appreciation for it.
And while Ling indulges whenever we’re driving and I put the classics into the car player, I think she’ll readily change to the radio whenever she can. As for family, my dad listens to the classics on the very rare occasion but he really enjoys only the Strauss’ family of waltzes. And my mum never quite understood why I amassed over the years that huge collection of classical music CDs at my old family home.
The one, possibly, spark of hope though is one of my nephews who’s taken to learning the violin. Yep, it looks like he could be the only person in the next generation who’ll learn a music instrument, and just possibly turn to the classics as his uncle did. :)
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