while visiting Montreal I got a musically astute* friend of mine to burn some of his current favourite music for me. We made sure all the tracks were labelled with at least artist name, so if i liked them I would know what I was listening to and could keep an eye out for more. Unfortunaley, the CDs were burnt as audio format rather than data format, and all that metadata was lost, something I didn’t realize till I sat down to listen to them and copy the tracks to my player.

It’s all good music but I found myself really dissapointed that I didn’t have artist names, more dissapointed than I would expect. The music is good, I can listen to it, something is better than nothing, so what am I unhappy about? I think it’s this: given the freely flowing nature of music** now that we’re in the future, every good tune brings with it the added satisfaction that it probably leads to more good tunes, either from that artist or that DJ or that mixer or that label or that genre or that city or what have you (all of these bits of descriptive information hopefully arrive with the music, or are easily discoverable once you have a name, and are searchable for). When I have music in a form that doesn’t easily facilitate that extension, I feel like it’s missing something. In this case it’s no great tragedy, with a little effort I can remember most of the names my friend mentioned mentioned and associate them with the tracks again. But it’s made something clearer to me. Apparently music for me has become a process rather than (just) a product.

Which sounds impure, or ungrateful of what’s right there in my ears. But such, I think, is the truth nonetheless.

*a note for my friends que dice espanol: that’s ‘astute’, not ‘astuto’, which is apparently different in a small but important way that makes me check myself every time I use that word now.

**unless you live in a tent in the bush, or your player breaks down while living in a tent in the bush, or it breaks down just before you leave for a distant country, or both, or all of them in a summer.