Okay, so have I ever mentioned how cool my wife is? Yeah. I had my 26th birthday last week, and when I got home that night, I had one of these awesome little toys waiting for me. The 60GB model. Yeah.

But that one was broken.

So I exchanged it for a new one, and that one has been awesome. Combine that with Tivo, Tivo AutoPilot, and a few hours of patience, and I was watching Tivo’d episodes of Alias, Lost, Veronica Mars, and the Mind of Mencia on my iPod the next day (which came in handy because I had a lot of riding-in-a-car to do that day).

I seriously have the best wife ever.

I began ditching CD’s for MP3′s back in the [Real] Napster heyday. Back in 1999, I could see it all coming together — I could have all of my music on my computer, burn my own custom CD’s, and not have to carry around jewel cases or CD binders. I liked CD binders because they were nowhere near as bulky as jewel cases and I could organize my music better, but my CD’s always ended up getting scratched to heck.

So, I bought my first new computer (as opposed to using hand-me-down computers), downloaded Winamp and Napster 2.0b5, and in a matter of about a year or so, had filled up the entire 3GB’s on my hard drive. Windows actually told me that it didn’t have enough space to complete the download of a 3 minute song. I had 1.2 MB available on my drive. Whoops!

By the time I bought my first 15GB iPod, I had a whopping 7GB of music. I listened to music on my computer, but i still listened to my CD’s more — mostly because I didn’t feel like taking the time to rip my 250 CD’s to MP3. However, having an iPod radically changed my music habits. I could carry my entire music collection with me in an elegant, white, palm-sized device? Having MP3′s no longer meant that I was stuck sitting in front of my computer in order to listen to them. Well, from there it was all downhill.

I started ripping more and more of my CD’s to MP3. I borrowed friend’s collections and started ripping CD’s as well — mostly CD’s that I’d purchased previously, but were now all scratched up. Technically I already have a license for the music that I already purchased, right? It’s not my fault CD’s aren’t all that durable. Anyways, in 2 months, I’d doubled my music collection and maxed out the capacity on my iPod. Not long after that, my wife surprised me with a 17″ Powerbook G4, and since that had more capacity, I decided to move my music collection over to my Powerbook. From there, I was free to get more and more music. I hit up all the Kazaa’s, WinMX’s, Limewire’s, and IRC’s of the world to find new music… and it was great! Mostly, I had gotten tired of the radio with all of the repetition of songs, and knowing that there was lots and lots of great music out there that wasn’t getting airplay.

I found some good chatrooms on IRC where I could get some compilation/sampler CD’s that had really good Alternative/Rock from bands that I’d never heard of before. One of those bands has become a new favorite — Motion City Soundtrack — with the song “The future freaks me out”. Maybe you’ve heard it?

I’m on fire
And now I think I’m ready
To bust a move
Check it out, I’m rockin’ steady — go!

I would never have found out about them if I’d stuck to the “legal”, RIAA way of doing things, but because of that, I’ve purchased both of their albums online.

So anyway, over the last 18 months-ish, my post-iPod music collection has gone from 7GB to 36.31 GB, as opposed to my pre-iPod collection that took nearly 5 years to grow to 7GB.

Now, back to my original point, I spent the weekend finally going through all of my old CD’s, and ripping whatever could be salvaged from scratched-to-heck-ness. I made sure to download the album art for everything, so I’m really not missing anything but the liner notes. But even then, what do the liner notes typically consist of? Lyrics, band member names, and thank you’s. You can get lyrics and band member names online. And thank you’s? I mean, really, who cares? And if you do care, then keep the liner notes for that album.

Which gets me to my last point. I don’t normally advertise or recommend anything unless I think it’s really good. This is one of those times. Check out Last.fm. It has plugins for a number of music players (including iTunes and Winamp), that will upload the tracks you listen to into their system. From there, they can also find your “musical neighbors”, so you can see what people who listen to similar music to you are listening to. This can help you find new music that may or may not be playing on the RIAA-strangled radio. You can also create your own custom radio station that streams CD-quality music to the last.fm player. My wife and I were cleaning our apartment last weekend, and I had my custom radio station streaming to my stereo (via Airport Express and NiceCast), and we both commented that it was like the perfect radio station that only played good songs and didn’t have any commercials.

So now, I open it up to you. What are your musical habits like? How much do you listen to music? What kind of music is on your iPod/iTunes/whatever these days?

I came across this blog post over at Jeffrey Veen’s site, and completely agree with it. There’s a lot more that I’d like to write about this, and I’m sure I will someday soon, but until then, I’d like to post a link to this short article:

So is this bad? Am I hurting the artists by “stealing” their music? I was talking to Jenny Conlee, accordion player for the Decemberists, at their last San Francisco show about this. She said she would much prefer to sell stuff at the gigs, rather than through stores — though it doesn’t scale as well. She told me that if you bought their album at the mall, they might see about $.80. Amazon nets them just over a buck. But at the gigs, where they sell CDs for just $10, the band keeps half. Not to mention the percentage of the door take.

Read the rest of Jeffrey Veen’s article.

Maybe the whole industry could stand a bit of downsizing. Reduce costs, help fight media consolidation, help niche markets thrive, produce good stuff instead of slickly packaged garbage aimed at radio. Then we’ll talk about how filesharing is hurting good people. You can start by getting a refund on that fancy website.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Anyways, here are sections of lyrics of some of the songs that stand out to me:

DON’T STAY
Don’t stay.
Forget our memories,
Forget our possibilities,
Take all your faithlessness with you,
Just give me myself back,
And don’t stay.

I don’t need you anymore,
I don’t want to be ignored.
I don’t need one more day.
Of you wasting me away
…with no apologies.

SOMEWHERE I BELONG
I want to heal, I want to feel
What I thought was never real
I want to let go of the pain I’ve held so long
Erase all the pain ’til it’s gone

I want to heal, I want to feel
Like I’m close to something real
I want to find something I’ve wanted all along
Somewhere I belong

I will never know myself until I do this on my own
And I will never feel anything else until my wounds are healed
I will never be anything ’til I break away from me
And I will break away, I’ll find myself today.

I want to heal, I want to feel,
…like I’m somewhere I belong.

FAINT
I am a little bit insecure,
A little unconfident.
‘Cause you don’t understand
I do what I can,
But sometimes I don’t make sense.

I am what you never want to say,
But I’ve never had a doubt
It’s like no matter what I do
I can’t convince you
For once just to hear me out.

I can’t feel the way I did before.
Don’t turn your back on me,
I won’t be ignored.
Time won’t heal this damage anymore.
Don’t turn your back on me,
I won’t be ignored.

No! Hear me out now.
You’re gonna listen to me,
Like it or not…
Right now.