Why something has got lost in the move from vinyl to download

NET RESULTS:There is still something very unsatisfying about managing music collections in download digital form

I LIKE the ease of downloading music. If you have an internet connection, all you have to do is track down what it is you’re interested in, click, buy and download and, moments later, you’ve got your new album or songs.

So like many people, I have a nice library of music files now. There are dozens upon dozens of albums and thousands of songs. Even so, on a 40 GB MP3 player, that whole collection only takes up a small slice of its memory.

I owned a few generations of Walkman cassette music players and that certainly puts an iPod in context. Tape-playing Walkmans were the marvel of a previous musical era. I cycled around Ireland two decades ago with a Walkman and a pile of cassettes tapes rattling around in my pannier bags.

I am sure that 20 pannier bags stuffed full of cassette tapes would not come close to the capacity of my current black iPod’s portable music library. On the other hand, 10 tapes easily saw me through a week of touring on a bicycle.

Up and down hills, weaving along narrow coastal roads, hard slogs across bogland where the wind always blew but always was a headwind – a small tape collection was more than enough accompaniment for the exertion.

My iPod is about a third the size of even the smallest Walkman I ever owned. It carries my entire home musical collection (and has room for several more besides).

For all the wonder of that, though, there is still something very unsatisfying about managing music collections in digital form. With the titles squished into the tiny screen of an iPod, or in a long narrow column on my computer, they blur into each other.

Half the time I can’t remember what I actually own and half the time I don’t remember what a given title is when I look at it. I read the name of the artist and I read the title and can’t recall where the recording came from or what it sounds like.

The extent of my memory loss when it comes to my own music collection struck home when I was on holiday recently. As I scrolled through the music titles on my iPod, I realised probably 25 per cent of them were a mystery.

This reached the point of ultimate ridiculousness this week when I bought a number of jazz and classical CDs.

I still like to buy CDs for some types of music because the sound is much richer and I can make a higher quality digital file for my online collection than what one gets on the standard download offering.

I was admiring my purchases and just about to unwrap one of the CDs for a listen, when the title triggered a vague suspicion. Off I went to find my iPod and a few seconds of scrolling revealed that yes, I had bought this exact album as a download only a couple of weeks ago – and listened to it.

Sheesh.

I know what the problem is, though. It’s that there’s no physical object to associate with an album anymore and nothing to read. When albums came on vinyl, people put the record on the turntable and then perused the album cover and the liner notes many times over, over many years of ownership.

The album art was central to the whole experience.

The move to the smaller CD format was a frustration in this regard.

When CDs arrived, the most frequent complaint – along with their “colder” sound compared to vinyl – was that album art was reduced to a tiny square and album notes got squished down into small booklets or microscopic printing on the cover.

With digital music, you at best have a postage stamp album cover image on the computer or digital music player. Typically, you have no liner notes (although sometimes you get a text file to download but who reads those?). In many cases, there’s no album cover at all.

Even so, because you spend so little time looking at the cover, you have no visual trigger for the music or the artists. My music is often anonymous until I actually listen to it to remember what it is.

By contrast, I carry around a massive library of vinyl era album art in my head from the very large record collection I gathered over a couple of decades. Name a vinyl album that I own and chances are I can describe the actual album art. Name a digital download in my collection and I have no such association.

Maybe it’s just one of those generational things and the average 17-year-old has no problem keeping track of several hundred download recordings in their head.

However, for another generation I’m convinced that some central element of the whole music listening experience and its associated pleasures has vanished as the visual link and the tangible object has faded into music by zeros and ones.