Nano Note: Barocco
One of the first playlists that I created was effectively a dump of all the baroque music that I had in my CD library. I avoided some of the greatest hits — the Water Music, the Brandenburg Concertos — and I excluded vocal music as well. Without scraping every corner of the apartment for miscellaneous discs, I was able to amass a list that would play for 2.8 days. That’s a lot of wallpaper.
Very carefully, I moved the music around. I didn’t want to listen to all twelve of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi in a row, followed by the three discs of Scott Ross’s Scarlatti Anthology. It took forever, and I didn’t do a very good job. But the result was — not tedious. Did I mention the six-CD set of Handel’s chamber music? There are only so many consecutive flute sonatas that I can listen to without going barkers.
Being the proselytizer for pleasure that I am, I persuaded LXIV to permit me to lend him the Nano with the baroque music on it, together with the Logitech dock/speaker set that I bought for travel. I have to upgrade it, because it conks out if the music is too quiet. The problem never arises with baroque music, all of which sounds just as loud as everything else, but Ravel’s Bolero stops it every time. Ten minutes go by, and I’m wondering why the music stopped. What now? Oh, that.
As I thought, LXIV was pleased to have the cornucopia of baroque music add a congenial note to the atmosphere of his flat. “It’s playing when I go to sleep,” he said, “and it’s still playing when I wake up.” (Now, for my part, I cannot fall asleep if music is playing.) So far so good. The thing was, the baroque music was loaded onto the one Nano that I’d bought directly from Apple. It was fire-engine red, and it had my initials stamped on the back. I thought I’d just load the playlist onto another Nano — the pink one, say — and exchange it with LXIV.
That’s when I discovered that I had done all my careful massaging of the baroque playlist on the red Nano itself. Guess what? You can’t download a playlist from a Nano. Not even if your hard drive contains all the same MP3 files! Are we stupid yet? (Why people extol Apple as they do, I’ll never understand.)
LXIV lived with the pink Nano for about a week. He never complained, but he didn’t have to. I was haunted by guilt. Having printed the playlist ( you can do that, at least), I exchanged the Nanos once again. And I am still, about a month later, reconstructing the baroque playlist, this time on a hard drive. Unfortunately, my standards have gone up dramatically, so the going is very slow. And of course there are the inevitable improvements…
It occurred to me that one of these improvements ought to be the overture, as it were; the first piece of music on the playlist. And what ought that to be? What else but Mouret’s famous Rondeau? Famous, that is, from years and years and years of use by Masterpiece Theatre.
As I don’t have a CD with the Mouret on it, I went to Amazon, where I was quickly seduced into downloading the item for the proverbial $0.99. There’s a first time for everything, and my first time with Amazon downloads included losing the Mouret somewhere in my computer. It certainly wasn’t appearing in iTunes! I was so exasperated that I had to do three other technical things before I could come back and thimk [sic!]about what to. Using ancient techniques learned in the days of Windows File Manager, I unearthed the file and put it where it belonged.
And, boy, does it sound cheesy! I couldn’t like it more.