It was sometime in 2016. I was on a late night flight back home. I landed, took a rickshaw back home, and was shuffling things in my backpack to organise it. Rest of the journey was uneventful. Twenty-four hours later, I realised, my iPod Classic was not with me. Had I forgotten it in the aircraft? In the rickshaw? I couldn’t recall. And not knowing where to start searching for it, even if I could, was the end of it. And life has never been the same again.
I loved iTunes and my iPod Classic for the features; mostly for the fantastic organisation of music it allowed. IMO, there hasn’t been better navigation of music since the wheel. Sadly, Apple killed the iPod Classic a while ago, and a better (or equivalent) alternative was never released. (Nope, iPhone wasn’t the alternative.)
Over the years, I plodded along with many devices, apps, and options to recreate the experience to listen to my music. Many apps were downloaded, tried for weeks, discarded. Months went by, doing this: rinse and repeat. And I was spending an enormous amount of time identifying the ideal option, when I should have been listening to my favourite music.
Years later, here I am, settling for a sub-par option, all of my music still not available to me, but managing somehow. I’ve made a few playlists that work for me, but they aren’t as refined as the ones I had before 2016. I am learning skip songs (which I don’t like to do: they shouldn’t have been in the playlist in the first place) and have to use the unsmart methods to create and add to my playlists.
All that we depend on, breaks down somehow, somewhere. Parents get old and die, partners separate, jobs are lost, pandemics engulf, friends drift. We lose our favourite music devices. But life has to go on.
Let the music play.
Gaizabonts 