A slice of music?

For those who don't know, I have just put in an order for a 60GB iPod. Yes, I am joining the fashionable ranks of the white earphone club.

Readers of this blog know that I have not taken this decision lightly. But I've decided to live with an almost-full 60GB iPod and hopefully they'll have a bigger model by the time I get close to exceeding the capacity.

So for the past week, I have been very busy ripping my CD collection. I manage to get through a case of 32 CDs per day, using iTunes to do the ripping.

I started with digipaks (i.e. CDs with cardboard or non-standard sleeves) as they are kept separate in my collection on the top shelf. These are normally the CDs that get discriminated against when I'm deciding what to put in my CD wallet for the week, because it takes more effort to take the disc out of these delicate sleeves than it takes to get a CD out of a standard jewel case. So I'm glad the iPod is going to remove that barrier of discrimination.

I'm now well into the jewel cases, which I have sorted into alphabetical order by artist name, and then chronological order within the artist. I am well into the D's now, and it's already been a week. Yep, there's lots of CDs.

Each day, I listen to all the songs I have ripped so far using the iTunes "Shuffle" feature. For the first few days it was fairly predictable, with not many tunes in the library and I found myself listening to a lot of artists over and over again. Since the 15 Beatles CDs have been ripped, I find myself getting at least a Beatles track a day. I guess the odds are in favour of that. It's cool hearing a Beatles cut that I haven't heard for a while, and probably wouldn't have heard for ages had I not been getting an iPod. I'm a loser from Beatles for sale being one such cut. Choice cut, great lyric.

Each day more artists, songs and albums are getting added to the mix, making the shuffle more exciting each day. And I'm only up to D! It feels like I'm baking a giant musical cake, where the first few days contained the flour (Augie March, Badly Drawn Boy, Beatles) then the eggs are slowly added to the mix (Belle & Sebastian, David Bowie, Jeff Buckley) and now we are getting to the sweet sweet sugar (Elvis Costello, Crowded House). It's fascinating listening to the collection on shuffle, it really is. It makes me realise even more what a brilliant songwriter Elvis Costello is, when I hear a great song like Poor fractured atlas after a mediocre song off David Bowie's Diamond dogs. It really puts things into perspective.

Today I added the dark paprika of The Cure to the mix. The bleak Cold from their bleakest album Pornography came up in the mix. A song I hadn't heard in a long time, and didn't even remember it to be frankly. It's great rediscovering songs like this, although it doesn't even feel like a rediscovery, simply loads of music potential that was waiting to be unleashed.

Tomorrow's going to be an exciting day - the mysterious Doors aroma will be added. And one of my absolute favourites, the spicy Bob Dylan. This cake is getting tastier by the day, and I'm not even a quarter of the way there.

This is going to be one mighty strange tasting cake when it's finished baking in about a month.