Category: field notes

Just some thoughts about this end-of-year semi-retreat I take from digital life:

Life is inherently digital these days, so it’s not like I’ve turned off my computers, unplugged the television, or — let alone and — put my phone in a safe. I make no claims to using my devices significantly less often. In fact, just this week I upgraded my second generation iPad Pro to this year’s model, aiming to take advantage of the laptop-like benefits of iPadOS 26, aka Tahoe.

I’m not really that concerned about the extent to which I use personal technology. I already read a lot of books. I already go for walks. I go to concerts and spend time at museums. I may not spend ten minutes with a single piece of art, but I can easily do five. I have meals with friends. I spend much of my non-work hours with family. In other words, the main break that I take at the end of the year is that of digital connection to other people. Even then, I’m still checking email. I still work. I’m vaguely responding to DMs, though because I turned off social media I find many go missing for extended periods of time.

The distinction here is what I think of as “formal social media,” or “immediate social media” — by which, for my purposes, I mean the likes of Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. These are technological platforms in which much of the response cycle is short and rapid. For good measure, I also fold into this category of social media a solid number of the email lists, Discords, and BBSs (most founded on Discourse) I’m part of. I’m not a purist about just about anything, including this segment of digital activity. There are a couple book discussion groups I participate in, between email and Discord, that I won’t be turning a blind eye to, simply because I want to continue those asynchronous conversations.

What I am turning down, if not off, is the number of conversations — especially the explicitly short-term ones inherent in social media — that I participate in. I’ll almost certainly re-up come January. For now, the respite is, first and foremost, cozy. Digital cozy.

If you have a sizable collection of MP3s (and equivalent — I mostly use ALAC, which is Apple’s lossless file format), and whether your files are from Bandcamp or are rips of your CD collection, or whatever/wherever, I can’t really recommend a tool more than I do Plex (see: plex.tv; despite the site’s emphasis on video, it has a solid music-services offering).

I trust there are solid alternatives to Plex, maybe even some such tools that are superior (and certainly, don’t hesitate to recommend them to me), but for my purposes, Plex has provided much of what I’ve been looking for when it comes to having a home jukebox that I can access from, essentially, anywhere.

I have an old Mac mini — running an M1 chip, the first stage of Apple’s own chips, which are now up to M5 — that I purchased used on eBay. I can easily drag MP3s to it via a home network, and those files are then automatically, almost instantly, processed by Plex, and added to a searchable database. I can then listen to those files from pretty much wherever I want. There’s a Plex app on my laptop and the television, and there’s one on my phone that works great. The phone’s app even shows up in the car’s dashboard, so I can listen there. (The image up top is a screenshot from my phone, an iPhone 13 Pro, the first iPhone I ever owned, and which may be due for an upgrade.)

• Could Plex do what it does better? Sure.

• Does moving files sometimes get clogged up in ways I don’t understand? Yes. But eventually it works.

• Do .wav files in particular tend to get screwy when it comes to metadata, splintering albums into odd little multiple sub-albums? Unfortunately, yes, in which case I find converting them into another format does the trick.
  
• Does Plex’s emphasis on video make it feel like the audio services are vestigial? Kinda. Yeah.

• Do publicists and musicians generally share audio that doesn’t even have metadata? Yes, but complaining is sort of obnoxious on my part, since I’m getting the music for free.
  
• Does the system every once in a while require a software update that I’ve yet to sort out how to manage when I’m not at home? Yes, but not that often.
  
• What’s next? I suspect I am not making the most of Plex, and I need to spend more time on whatever Reddits, and Discords, and etc.’s where Plex heavy users congregate.

Whenever I ponder these issues, I remind myself that it wasn’t terribly long ago that I had to deal with the fact that for a given artist, I might have LPs, and tape cassettes, and CDs, and 7″ singles, and EPs, not to mention box sets and odd formats, and I never had a system that let me organize those in a meaningful way. I just accepted the scenario as the way things were. Back in the late 1990s, when I first had a Palm Pilot, I kept a database of my album collection on it so that I could refer to the list when I went to record stores. Those memories help me maintain some perspective given whatever modern hassles I now experience.

I still occasionally buy physical music media, but not all that often. And I subscribe to one streaming service, YouTube Music, which I selected because it came free with ad-free YouTube. I’ve considered using another streaming service, perhaps Tidal or Apple, but can’t quite rationalize paying for another one when YouTube works fine.