I have detailed many and various levels of music storage here on The Aural Retentive. From the humble beginnings when I had no storage at all and only had analog, to the MP3 days I stored on my puny leftover hard drive space, to making my own CD’s and then filling the CD’s with MP3’s and then finally burning those CD’s onto DVD’s.
Then came the external USB storage.
Dalton used and ended up giving me an external that held I believe 100 Gig. That to me at the time seemed astronomically huge. I think I exclaimed something foolish like “I’ll never fill all that up!”
Alas. I did, and with a vengeance. I bought a 250 Gig USB external, filled it. I bought a 500 Gig USB external, filled it. Then I got a 5 Terabyte powered USB external. It was half the size of the 500 Gig storage and faster too. That I have yet to fill up, but give me time.
The next issue became portability. I used to carry the 500 Gig USB external in my backpack for work so that I had all my music with me and when exchanging with folks I used a variety of USB options. My personal fave was the Star Child Kiss USB. Always makes for an amusing handoff.
I have never lost this one. However I have lost others, and many times I found myself searching for one, so at one point I bought a bandolier of identical 32 Gig red flash drives with the idea that I would use these for exchanges.
Of course as a hard core nerd, I’m afraid to use them for that purpose and keep using old crap ones! I did fill them with different flavors of music for use in my own car though. 1 for Zappa, 1 for Khruangbin, 1 for Space Jams… If I lose my own flash drives I only have myself to blame.
Here is yet another step in the evolution of storage for me. Behold!
Killer box too. That’s for a separate sub-Reddit nerd convention.
Inside? A metal sleeved with keychain USB with 2 Terabytes of storage. OMG.
2TB. I can put my entire music collection on this with room to spare and carry it with my keys! This will solve a lot of music emergencies. Of course, it is WAY to large to even expect my car’s system to read it all before then end of a long trip.
So, yeah, modern problems, but also modern solutions.
When they invent the bio-chip that will directly connect to my ears I will be writing another post. For now I will just stare at this 2TB keychain and deliberate on what and how to fill it.
Until then my friends.
The Aural Retentive 