Rip. Mix. Burn.
---------------

For someone who makes his living in tech, I am not very
enamoured of gadgets.  Very much unlike my wife, who has a
great liking for same, particularly in the realms of
electronic/media and cookery. Of course, she acquires far
fewer of the former now that most of the things she used to
buy have been consolidated into that ultimate gadget, the
smartphone. But the relics of a bygone age of ipods, digital
voice recorders, digital cameras, answering machines, travel
alarm clocks, and flip phones are still to be found in
various junk drawers around the house.

In contrast, I resisted getting a cell phone for quite a
while and then, when smartphones came along I managed to
resist that compulsion for a long time too (although to be
fair, I seem to recall owning at one point a smartphone-like
device that only worked over wireless.)  Eventually though
my employer decided I was worthy of a work-supplied iPhone,
and it's hard to say no to something like that. Following
which, of course, I became hooked on the convenience just
like everyone else, and moved on to a personal iPhone after
my employer decided to save money by not issuing smartphones
to middle managers like me anymore.

But although I value the convenience, my relationship with
my phone increasingly troubles me. Even though I have
resisted loading all my personal information on it, and
install very few third-party apps, it still bothers me how
much information about me is stored on or accessible via
this device. And more so, just the ubiquity of it ... the
expectation that I will always be reachable, that I will
always have it on and carry it whereever I go; that I reach
for it multiple times a day in a seemingly endless cycle of
self-distraction; the way its corporate masters insinuate
themselves into the nooks and crannies of my daily life
... I'm starting to actively resent the thing, to be honest.

All of which has got me thinking about ways I could mitigate
the problematic aspects of it, without getting rid of it
entirely (tempting, but not a realistic option at this
point, sadly). 

One of those ways might be to look at resisting the
consolidation I spoke of earlier, by returning to a
(slightly) earlier era of pre-smartphone artifacts. As an
example, one could carry physical cash and credit cards,
rather than carrying digital surrogates on one's phone. In
place of banking apps, one could do one's banking on an
actual computer or maybe even in person. One can carry a
transit pass rather than (again) using a digital surrogate. 

And, moving from meaningful acts of resistance to the more
trivial, one could load one's music on an old-school media
player, rather than, say, obtaining it through various
online sources and linking it to a vendor-surveilled online
library. I recently had the opportunity to do just that,
when in one of my rummages through our junk drawers I came
across an AGPtEK A02 (8gb) media player that my wife (we
think) must have acquired some years ago. It's a bit of a
mystery where it came from, to be honest; with her
preference for i-devices a cheapish commodity media player
is not the sort of thing she would normally have purchased.
There were no files on it, so I'm not sure it was ever used.

Regardless, that discovery got me going on a fun trip back
to the "Rip. Mix. Burn." era of a generation ago. I still
have most of my old CDs (many of which I've already
ripped) and I thought, why not burn a playlist for the
gym?

The Debian workstation I built for the home office has an
optical drive, of course, so I had all the infrastructure I
needed to get going on my project. I use the command line
tool 'abcde' for ripping purposes, which does an excellent
job of copying the songs and labelling the tracks
appropriately (using metadata from MusicBrainz, I
believe). For organizing my digital music I use the TUI
application 'cmus', which has a nice simple vi-like command
line interface.

All my music files are easily accessible in well-labelled
directories, which makes them easy to transfer to other
devices, such as the AGPtEK. Transferring itself is a simple
drag-and-drop (or F5 in Midnight Commander) from my desktop
to the device, connected via USB cable. No bloated
proprietary software required.

I was pleasantly suprised to learn that despite being
advertised as an "MP3 player", the AGPtEK can handle
.ogg files just fine, as that's the format most of my
collection is stored in. Not only can it play them, it also
reads the associated metadata and creates appropriate
entries under "Albums" and "Artists" in its extremely basic
(and mostly intuitive) interface.

It's a little impractical I guess, since I still have to
have my phone with me in the gym, so now I'm carrying two
devices.  But even though I could have done a version of
this on my phone, it felt quite liberating to do it on an
inexpensive, simple, non-Internet connected device. At least
I know the tracks I load will be preserved as-is, rather
than 'helpfully' being replaced with DRM "matches" from an
online store.[1]

Maybe there are other ways to reduce my phone's overall
footprint in my life?  I'll continue to give it some
thought. 


References
----------

1. "Apple replacing my private music ... "
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7142385?sortBy=rank