Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | New adventures in hi-fi:
While [Michael] Stipe and [Mike] Mills have developed other interests in their adult life beyond the band and music, [Peter] Buck hasn’t. He recently filled up the iPods of everyone who worked on REM’s new album with songs that he thought they might like – and considering iPods can take up to 10,000 songs, this was a Herculean feat of downloading. “He’s become obsessed with it,” says Stipe. “He has done this for everyone who worked on our new record, including the engineers, who he had only known for a couple of weeks. What’s interesting is to discover what he thinks we should be listening to. Mike got entire albums by Miles Davis, for example, while I only got the greatest hits. It must have taken him weeks, but he really isn’t interested in anything apart from his family and music,” adds Mills. “He reads books, and plays music, and hangs out with his family. That’s it. So he loves the iPod because it gives him a chance to go through thousands of records that he hasn’t played for the last 20 years.”
And who wouldn’t want Peter Buck to turn you on to a playlist, even one that had 10,000 tracks: I wonder how long it would take to listen to that? My 10Gb one has 1,565 tracks, for 8.78 Gb of space and a playing time of 4 days, 18 hours, 52 minutes, and 23 seconds. So a 40Gb one might have as much as 480 hours of music on it: that’s a lot of bus rides. I shudder to think how much disk space he has at home . . .
This is the second city where I have had a chance at a Peter Buck sighting: it was always interesting to see people’s reactions in Atlanta when he would stop into Oxford Books (RIP) or Wax n’ Facts. Oxford? Awe and speechlessness. Wax n’ Facts? Who cares?
On a related note, I have been playing with AcquisitionX, a P2P client for OS X. I bought some CDs of tunes that weren’t available at the iTunes Music Store, and decided to see how much of it I can find on the P2P networks. It’s been a mixed bag so far. I also tried some of the various mule/donkey clients but they seemed not to work very well: slow, confusing, and not all that rich a source.
So far, so good. Lots of sweet, tuneful Aztec Camera for my listening pleasure.