Has iTunes, etc. impacted your listening habits?


Long before there was MP3, or at least long before I knew about it, my only real choice for music was to pick a disc out of the collection, throw it into my player of choice at that moment, and press play. Want to hear something else? Take the old disc out, put in the new one, etc.

But since I've burned my entire collection (minus non-hybrid SACDs) into my computer, I find it's just so damned EASY to press play and hear it through the mediocre desktop system. No changing discs, file through every range of song, artist, genre, etc.

Now, I don't have those lovely audiophile listening sessions on the big rig quite as often. And when I do, I'm listening to those non-hybrid SACDs that aren't on the computer.

Solution? Upgrades, baby! Get that main system back to where it's just so thoroughly compelling that the little ol' Dell just won't cut it any more.

I suppose I could have invested in wireless solutions to beam those wireless tracks to the big rig, but somehow I'm not covinced that it's a fully matured tachnology/too expensive right now/limited capability/I can't totally give up the 5 1/4" discs/whatever the hell else I'm worried about.

Has anyone else had their listening habits impacted by the MP3/iTunes revolution?

--Brian
thedautch
I am listening to my Squeezebox now and have been all day. My Transport is sitting there powered up but I am sitting on the couch with my laptop in my lap jamming away..

Chris
Not mine but every other person in my house. Wife and two daughters listen almost exclusively to ipod (some through speaker system) or car stereo.
One of these days I'll get one as they laugh at me if when we travel and I carry my discman.
Itunes has impacted my listening quite a bit, since I work more than I am home. I have a pretty nice setup at work, Quad Intel MacPro/30" Monitor connected to project headamp/sennheiser 600's and a panasonic xr50/b&w 602. I can listen all day at work to my lossless files, and the sound is really good. When I get home, I listen to my main system but end up missing the ease of selecting music vs. digging through my 8 224 cd binders finding the disc I want. The random function allows me to revisit cd's I have not listened to in a long time. My next step is to add a iTV to my main system.
Moral victory: for the first time in eight years, I actually started a thread that people thought was worth responding to. I'm one of those guys who thinks only *other* people's threads will turn out to be popular. :-)
A couple of points of clarification for anyone who hasn't explored the option of putting your music on a hard drive.

iTunes and mp3's don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. iTunes is an application that runs on either a PC or a Mac and is used to organize and play music files. Those files can be in any of several formats, including AIFF, the same files that are on your CD's. You can also manage mp3's or several other file formats but the choice of quality and file size is entirely up to you.

In the same way, the iPod and mp3's don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. It's possible to store and listen to many different file formats on the iPod, from uncompressed files identical to the originals on your CD's to highly compressed mp3's. Again, it's your choice, based on what kind of fidelity you require and how much music you want to store in a given space.

And, it isn't necessary to have an iPod to use iTunes. iTunes is the tool you to load music to an iPod but it works wonderfully well on it's own to play music through any of the devices recommended in the posts above.