Core77

Don't shrink my music, just make it invisible

By Rain Noe - April 27, 2010

in Tech | Object Culture

Question: How small does something have to be before you can lose it? And I'm not talking about leaving your cell phone on the train--I'm talking like I know it is somewhere in this house, I can't find it and it is driving me nuts.

One thing I've never lost is an LP. At 12 inches square it's just too big; if it was missing from my room it was stolen. Smaller CDs and cassettes, never lost them either, if I couldn't find one I'd often recover it by rooting around in the couch or under a car seat.

But SanDisk's slotRadio cards, forget about it. They're now selling 500 Motown classics on something the size of a postage stamp. If I had one I'd immediately transfer the files to my laptop, since the chances of my dog eating that in one bite, or me sending that through the washing machine, are slim. But you can't; the slotRadio cards are proprietary and have to go in a SanDisk MP3 player like the one above. I can't understand why you'd take something that's easily transferable and preservable by digital means and turn that into something easily lost. I suppose the motive is profit.

It also occurs to me that if you could take the Hot Tub Time Machine back to 1987 or 1967, grab an album cover designer and bring them back to our time, they'd be horrified. Here's the square foot they had to play around with back then:

And here's the comparative size of the slotRadio Motown Card:

Music media shrank and eventually disappeared into bits, and to me it seems a step backwards to bring it back into tiny physical media.

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D

14 years ago

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oh come on now, it's a bloody micro SD card, the same damn thing goes into cell phones, probably the rationale behind this is you can plonk your music into a cell phone and mp3 player, probably the TV and fridge one day too, it more about convergence then form factor, a micro SD card is probably the most standardized format in the mobile device market, there's nothing proprietary about it
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gerrrg

14 years ago

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I couldn't have agreed more. Slot music was destined to end up vaporware; I don't want tiny things that could be easily lost; I want my music to be difficult to lose but easy to access.
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Joshua Mercado

14 years ago

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One minor rationale for this is that I find most people do not have a clear understanding of where digital data exists. It used to be that you could easily and visibly make a copy of your music from tape to tape or from CD to CD. Most people I encounter see the computer as one unit. Even if there are two hard drives on the machine it's not clear that two unique copies can exist. You'll hear, " It's on the computer," much more frequently than, "it's on the E: drive in x folder" So at some point in the transition from analog to digital media (both hard disk and flash) the loss of tactility in data has become an issue and users are unsure at how to preserve and sometimes even find their files.
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Tordek

14 years ago

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Just a note: a 12sq in is 3x4. a record is 12x12; 144 sq in.
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