Stompin at the Savoy

Wasn't there a famous cartoon of a man running for dear life entitled "Harry Houdini escaping from Texas"?

I'm a little surprised you - something of a gear-head - wouldn't even check out the whole concept of a smart phone. My kid got an ipod touch back when they first came out. I come from a pretty traditional IT background so there was some point where I had to do something with it and I asked my son if there was a manual for it. He gave me a sort of wondering look and said you just dink around with it and it's self-explanatory. This is apple's basic posture and concept - ya don't need a manual just dink around and it will become clear. That has become somewhat less true as the iphone gained all sorts of functionality and the list of 'settings' has grown exponentially. Still and all, it's a fabulous tool, like a swiss army knife for the computer age. I almost never have phone conversations but I use my phone a lot. I use the timer/alarm app every day. The 'personal hot spot' on the phone serves as a backup when my ISP goes down. When I go out I often use the music app with some blue-tooth headphones when I have to wait, such as dental office. Or sometimes I read a book instead with the Kindle app. There is a built-in compass app in case you get lost. You can write and save memos. Access the internet. Text your friends! Take pictures and send them to your friends. It's pretty great. I've told all this to several friends in their seventies like me and they look at me as though I am proposing to take them for a trip on the Space Shuttle. Everybody has their own level of tolerance and interest in technology, I guess.

Um, so get an Android phone?

To get back to the original topic, I would recommend against a portable cd player for the car. It's going to bounce around and the controls will only really be safely accessible when the car is stopped. In addition, the capabilities of a cd player are so meager compared to a phone. For example you plug your phone in and call out "Hey Siri give me directions to 1750 Vine Street Los Angeles, California" and a map comes up on your dashboard showing where your car is, and spoken directions follow. You can bring hundreds of albums with you in the car instead of a few cds which you probably cannot control with voice commands- "Hey Siri, play Classic Don Byas Sessions". How about "Hey Siri where's the next rest stop?" Your cd player can't answer that. The smart phone clearly is the mainline designated replacement for a car stereo. You'll miss out if you don't get with the program.

One pgm you can use to move music files to an iphone is Music Monkey. I didn't think it could do it but I upgraded to the current free version just now and was able to do it. I wonder if you can really operate an iphone effectively without itunes? How do you backup the phone to your pc? I doubt that anything but itunes is going to do that reliably... If you don't have a backup you may have trouble down the line.

My car has a lane sensing program which you can turn on or off. It gives a beep and a slight sensation on the wheel when you wander out of your lane. I generally keep it engaged. Pretty good feature. I also like the camera image shown on the dash when you reverse. The system can read speed limit signs and shows the speed limit on the speedometer, which is good.

You can install iTunes and still use another app as the default to play music. Go to Control Panel/Apps/Default Apps and set the program you want for music. That simple. You can also use your preferred program to rip cds and then import the resulting files into iTunes in order to put them on the device. Complain all you want about Apple's proprietary attitudes. I agree! Nevertheless, both you and I bought iphones and the easiest way to get music on them is to use itunes. Let me know if you come up with a better way!

Well there are other ways to put music onto an iphone but why not use iTunes? It's free and you are not required to use it to play music: you can just use it to rip cds and put them onto the iphone and use something else (or nothing) to play them on your pc. IPhones come with a built in player application which works seamlessly with iTunes but I believe you can use other applications on the phone to play music if you want. But why would you? It's simple and easy to use the existing software and there are few downsides.

I use an iphone with my two year old Toyota, which does not have a radio/disk player. The car comes equipped with Apple CarPlay. When I plug my phone into the usb port, I can see the screen of my phone on the dashboard display screen. I can operate the phone from there and do most things you do with a phone: navigate, play music, make or receive a call, etc.

You shouldn't have to type in any track names or other metadata. The program you use to rip the cd to disk - itunes, for example - gets all the metadata from online databases (so you do have to have internet connectivity while you rip disks). For single cds you generally don't have to do anything: insert the cd, say yes to your player program asking if you want to import this cd, let it run, and copy the resulting files to a usb drive, phone, etc. For sets, like Mosaic, there are some choices depending on how you want the multi-disk set to display, but you can still just go with the default settings and copy the resulting files. This all may seem complicated or difficult if you are not accustomed to working with digital audio files. But once you get into it, it's actually a cinch and the benefits are huge.

Most recent cars are set up to work by attaching a phone to the USB port or connecting via wfi. Consult your owners manual or do some searches online for music solutions for your model. A lot of cars can use Apple CarPlay or similar software. This is better than a portable cd player, IMO. You load up a good few cds worth of music on your phone and away you go.

Yeah, I registered, which was fairly painless, and checked it out - you can get it for an hour and renew every hour. It's not too bad if you click the full screen icon and then hit F11 on a pc to get it really full screen and then you can use the "+" button to enlarge it big enough to read. I like the book. Wish I could find a copy for a reasonable price!

It's a limited preview - only the introduction - unless you create an account. I never knew of this book til now. It's pretty interesting. A surprising number of the entries are compilation albums with various groups. It's way out of date from a discographical point of view and a lot of this material is available now in different formats and combinations. It's gratifying to see that I actually know most of the music recommended!

Volume 7 was supposed to be released today but I see no sign of it. I took a look through Duke discography and I think this volume will contain very little not on the two Mosaic sets. Curious to see what is actually coming out.

I use USB hubs with hard drives. I have found there is a limit with the Dell PCs I use. Four usb hard drives will work sometimes for a while but things go wrong. So I generally only attach 3 or fewer hard drives. If you use more than 1 it has to be a powered hub with its own wall wart.

I listened to the first disk and enjoyed it. There is a sort of air of exploration - some participants are still playing swing as Byas edges into bop. It was very nice to hear from Tiny Grimes and Clyde Hart again, memorably heard on the early Parker Savoys. And Hot Lips Page is fun.

Yippee! Box just arrived.

The thing is whatever music drive you decide on, you kind of need at least two of them. Every once in a while you copy the current drive to its backup, then take the backup offline and store it away somewhere. Otherwise if one day your active drive fails, you are really up a creek. Or you can use a pc hard drive as a backup but that is an active drive and can fail. So you kind of need an extra drive.

The beauty of curating your own collection of digital music is you can access your whole collection or giant big chunks of it - instantly and anywhere. Plus you can store the cds etc in a storage unit and free up space at home. Or even sell them off and dispense with the hard-copies altogether. I haven't quite got there yet but I am thinking about it. The downside is you have to do a lot of curatorial tasks, keep backups, occasionally buy new hardware. Of course if you haven't been ripping your cds all along, inputting your collection could be a really huge task.

Stream what you have? Why bother to have it in the first place, just stream it then. If, of course you are satisfied with the resolution you are getting with streaming. Which I am not. Nor do I want to listen to ads. And why would I pay to not have ads when I already own the freakin' music? Nope, doesn't work for me.

Why? That's the whole point of having 4 TB or more of music files attached to a computer or device: you can instantly call up any album or track you want.

I don't seem to have that problem. If you use pause instead of just getting out of the app it has the same effect. When you return to the app it starts where you left off. At least on my 2 or 3 year old iphone.

Either the My Book external drive has some sort of errant sleep setting or it is simply defective. I have several 4 Terabyte portable hard drives that I use to store digital music and none have this problem. I don't know why you would prefer a large format device like My Book to the small 4 TB devices like My Passport, which works great for me. Seagate Expansion 4 TB is good too. Yes, an iPhone is just as good as an iPod for storing some music. The thing is most phones have fairly limited storage capacity. I use a digital Sony Walkman, which stores music on SD cards, which come in many sizes including 500 G and 1 TB.

Thanks for doing all that! Not being one of the first to receive the box may have a hidden silver lining: the music databases may well be populated with metadata by the time I get my set. I'd hate to think of typing in 9 cds worth of data 🤨

I ordered on October 29, which I think was the first day you could pre-order, and received a shipping notice today. Looking forward to this set!