In appreciation of the CD changer

You probably spend a lot of time consuming music, but how much do you consider HOW you consume music? Smartphones are cool and they let you carry around a ton of music at a time. Or maybe you're a streaming music user, with your Pandoras and Spotifies? But loading music on an iPhone is kind of a rigmarole, and I usually just end up hitting shuffle on the last 200 hundred added tracks anyway. I've remarked before that my musical ADD tends toward singles, but what if there were another way, to go a little deeper?

There is, and it's an old way: The CD Changer. Some of you may not have ever even used one of these things. Most of you, unless you owned an car with a fancy stereo system, or just had to have a tape deck up front for your existing (and I'm sure awesome) tape collection, realized it was much easier to keep a big binder full of CDs and switch them out up front. For those who've never had the dubious pleasure, this thing was usually mounted in the trunk, and you loaded 6 to 10 CDs in that little cartridge, and you could select any disc by number from the head unit up front. However, since changing CDs was a bit of a pain and you usually don't spend much time in your trunk, you tended to get stuck with your 10 CDs for longer than you'd've liked.  

But there was one thing it was good for, and that was letting you get deep into your CDs. You listened to them over and over and really got the complete sound an album was going for...call it a forced appreciation. So, in my quest for sonic bliss, I decided maybe it was time to try it a little old school. But, since for some odd reason no one sells a CD changer or anything that you can plug one into, I went with a USB stick full of 10...just 10, albums. It works exactly the same. You choose a folder, you get the tracks, and only the tracks. There's no 2000 song mega-mix playlist. There's no shuffle all, nor a 5 star rating system. It's just music, one album at a time.

So far, it's been pretty fun, and I swear I can almost hear that mechanical whir-click of the discs switching...almost.