Originally Posted By: jford
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I do have my entire music collection on my phone (I recorded, cleaned, and ripped all my albums (1500) and cassettes (850), as well as my CD's (2000)), but I have to futz with the phone while driving to play that, which isn't good.<...>

I agree. Which is why I bought a digital Walkman. 8 gigs of storage, drag-and-drop song entry via Windows File Explorer, and less than $75.

I have over 10,000 songs on it, ripped from my CDs and LPs or from purchased downloads. I chose the tunes for riding in the car, so there are few Classical pieces on it, as they tend to be long and need some compression to overcome road noise in the soft passages. I have a lot of pop/rock, blues, jazz, "real" R&B, soca, reggae, Latin American, and 'world music' on it.

I have it set for random play, so I just plug it into the aux mini phone plug, and let it play. It does over 50 hours on a charge, so even on a long car trip, it isn't going to quit playing.

I'm not into subscription services, if there is an alternative. As a gigging musician, I can't depend on a steady paycheck. I've always done OK (not rich, but not poor either) but if anything showed me the advantage of not having subscriptions, it was COVID. For about two years, nobody wanted to hire a band, as they were cautious about congregating in crowds. Thanks to now recurring bills, I made it through without having to dip into my savings.

Since last January, we are gigging like crazy. It seems people are trying to make up for lost time. It feels good to be doing what I love again.

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