Digital music is fine with me

Do you remember your first record player? Mine was something like the one pictured here. Technically it was portable since you could close it and carry it like a little suitcase but it would need an electrical outlet wherever you decided to use it. It had the standard 3 speeds but I only needed the 45 and 33rpms. Mostly just the 45rpms since that was what I was buying as a kid. I vaguely remember thinking why should I spend so much money on an album when I only want that one song I hear on the radio. So over a matter of years I had collected a fair amount of 45's. I did buy some albums as a teenager but quickly moved on to cassette tapes because they could be played in a car or on a portable (battery powered) cassette player. I skipped over the 8-track tapes because that technology was already fading by the late 70's. There were a few problems with the cassettes. First, if you wanted to listen to just a particular song, you had to guess where that song was located on the tape by pressing fast forward then possibly rewind then possibly fast forward again, unless your favorite song happened to be the first track on the tape. Second, the tape ribbon itself was somewhat vulnerable to dust, liquid, heat, etc. and might occasionally get stuck or eaten by your tape player. And the final problem with cassettes is that if you play them often enough, they will wear out, just like a record. So I was thrilled when the compact disc was born. I was also amazed at how a laser light beaming on this cool looking mini record, could somehow produce sound. Unlike cassette cartridges, there were no moving parts. Nothing could break or wear out. I really felt we had come as far as we possibly could in music technology with these new CD's. They did have to be handled somewhat carefully because they could get scratched and would occasionally skip like a record but overall they were a vast improvement. My favorite feature of a CD is the ability to select any song on it by pressing the button that takes you through the song tracks by number. No more searching with fast forward or rewind. That was over twenty years ago when I never would have imagined that music would now be stored on very tiny computer chips, not just a few songs but thousands of songs. How cool is it to have a device hanging from your keychain or in your pocket that has every song you ever liked stored in it? There are those out there that insist music sounds better on records or tapes but since most of us (including myself) can't tell the difference, digital music is fine with me. You can check out a huge selection of music/video players here at Amazon.