Cover Flow !

Tuesday night I organize my record collection; I often do this at periods of emotional stress. there are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, imerse your arms in it, touch it. High Fidelity - Nick Hornby


FINALLY - my record collection is BACK !

The picture below (also from High Fidelity) was me on any given night [or day] when I needed to be 'involved' with my music. Part of the musical experience, as any real baby boomer or music freak can tell you, was getting physical with those albums just as you would in any 'real' relationship.

That may be one of the biggest reasons (other than money) that I was a late adopter to the digital music age. I bought my first CD player and CD's [The Band, and K D Lang-Ingenue] sometime around '92-'93 - at least 6 years after I bought my last LP [Aerosmith-Permanent Vacation] and far behind the leading audio edge of the day. Over time as my ears got used to the different sound, and digital production got better I warmed up to the new format. Later as compression technology gave birth to pocket sized music players, I quickly embraced the idea of traveling with my entire music collection - hundreds of CD's - in my pocket - something I could never have imagined in my youth !

Though the benefits of portability had trumped some of what was missing in the digital world, scrolling through an anonymous title list on a small screen, though efficient, lacked the tactile excitement and mounting anticipation of picking up an album, absorbing the related visual, freeing the disk from its comfortable quilt-like enclosure, and carefully placing it on the waiting turntable, and watching, mezmerized, as it spins you toward the point of sensory overload.

Now that has changed ! Someone has considered the afore mentioned experience worthy of a digital do-over. NOW THERE IS COVER FLOW ! Apple iTunes has introduced an animation application that comes very close to recreating the visual excitement of actually searching through your record collection. As you can see in the above photo, just drag the mouse [or your finger on an iPod] side to side and your 'albums' flip front and center for your consideration the rest of the collection remains stacked left and right giving one that sense of order, mass - power.

It looks as if you're reorganizing your record collection, what is this cronological?
No.
Not Alphabetical?
Nope.
What?
Autobiographical.
No F_____n' way.
Yea - I can tell you how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in just 25 moves.
Man...
If I want find the song Landslide by Fleetwood Mac I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of '93 pile but didn't give it to them for personal reasons.
That sounds...
Comforting ?

Yes.


High Fidelity - (Screenplay)
D.V. De Vincentis, Steve Pink, & John Cusack
based on the novel by Nick Hornby