the future is now! part i

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, May 7, 2002 8:22am

I had one of those "hey, I'm in the future now" moments this past weekend while helping my friends prepare for a party.

My friends told me they needed help with music for the party, namely in finding some good dance music.

Now comes the first of many geeky admissions. I'm not ashamed to tell you these things because if I'm going to be futuristic, I must of necessity be geeky. Think of how the formerly geeky reputation of computers has given way to the ability to do hip things like procrastinate and find porn!

Anyhow, it has been the practice for many years now at my friends' parties that the music be played by a laptop shuffling through MP3s. And while this seems horribly nerdy to me (although not so much for a bunch of engineers), it is also very practical.

No more spending hours planning out a playlist and then hours more recording it. No, MP3s can be ripped or downloaded very quickly, and then it is easy to shuffle them around in a playlist until the order is what you want it to be.

Given that, I was trying to find some good dance MP3s that weren't the same old songs we hear at every party. I was looking for a few songs in particular I'd heard at dance clubs around town, but I didn't know anything about them other than the few repetitive words in them.

So naturally I went over to Google and typed in those lyrics and found the songs' artists. I then went over to CNET to find out the best way to download MP3s from the internet. I downloaded the software, and then proceeded to download the songs.

While I was doing that, I was ripping songs from my own CDs and editing them so as to remove overly long intros and other annoying bits.

When I was done, I FTPed all the songs to my web page, and my friend downloaded them onto the laptop, which played the music into his stereo for our party.

At one level, it's pretty mundane stuff, really. Nothing any high school student couldn't do, I guess. But that's what's so amazing about it - that this sort of information flows so freely and easily.