How do you listen to your music?

Technology has given us, and continues to give us many new ways to listen to the music we own. 

• Wax cylinders
• Bakelite disks
• Vinyl
• Magnetic tape
• Digital

And the same technology allows us to expand just how we listen to that music using the digital technology. We are no longer constrained by physical storage media but we now have many ways to listen via digital and especially though the internet.

When I was young I had vinyl. To make it portable I would record it onto cassette tape with a microphone up against the speakers. Then this became more convenient with the rise of the music centre with its inbuilt connectivity. The Sony Walkman and other devices of its ilk enabled portability to fantastic levels. Then the CD arrived with its durability, small size and dependence on less mechanical players than for cassettes. Couple this with the rise of the personal computer and you have the most fluid and portable storage medium - digital!

So if you're like me you buy CDs and immediately rip them to your hard drive. Or you buy music online and save it immediately to your hard drive.

A slight detour here - never, ever buy music in a restictive format or where it is restricted by DRM. The recording industry looks at DRM as 'Digital Rights Management'. It's nothing of the sort, it's Digital Restriction Managment with the recording industry restricting your rights to play and store your music how you want. I once bought an album from Napster many years ago. It was an album that I already owned in vinyl but I didn't have the ability to transfer it to my pc. All was well until I changed computers. I copied the file across but it wouldn't play. So I went to burn it to CD to move it across and it refused, said I didn't have the right to do that. So I've now paid for the same music twice but can't listen to it because I'm being restricted by the recording industry. Whose rights? Certainly not mine.

Back to the issue at hand! So I have my music all encoded alowing me to play it or to copy it to other devices and play it through them. It also acts as a backup facility if you like. I'll burn a CD to play in the car and when its worn and scratched I'll throw it out and burn another.

The increase in the spread of the internet also offers me new ways to listen to my music - streaming. All my music is also stored online in a password protected server that I can access using various protocols. I can now listen to my music on my phone and on any web enabled device. I know have my head firmly in 'The Cloud'. 

So to sum up where my music is and how I listen to it:

• Physical - CD
• Digital - hard drive and flash memory
• Online Digital - www.mp3tunes.com
• Mobile - lastfm.com plugin in Fring or directly using www.mp3tunes.com