Nano à nano

So I saw the ad for the iPod nano on telly last night. Just features someone holding it in their hand, looking at it, fighting over it with someone else who also wants to hold it.

Clever, because it shows you its size in relation to a giant hand. Advertising agencies have lists of these people in their Rolodexes: people with giant limbs, feet and hands mostly, but also giant teeth for toothpaste adverts and the like.

Yeah, it's neat, and shiny, and whatever. But I'm still not seduced. That's fine, because I'm not the target market. I'm not even tempted to get an "iPod-ready" car next time I buy, unless it becomes one of those things that makes a car hard to pass on, the in-car equivalent of Magnolia paint.

Anyway, it's clear what the selling point of the Nano is. They don't even bother to pretend it's about listening to music anymore. The one in the advert doesn't have headphones or earbuds attached to it. It's an object of desire for gadget freak fashion victims.

Do you remember seeing that old footage of Elvis in his pink Cadillac? He had a record player in it. One of those auto-changer things that would play up to six singles in a row. I bet that sounded great. And skipped a lot.

I was talking to Roy about the way the new Dylan Bootleg Series is mixed, how it seems to have been done in the "modern" way as opposed to them attempting to reproduce 60s-style mixing. So it sounds unnecessarily harsh in comparison to the original official releases. But then there's that CD thing anyway, the harshness of the sound - which isn't inaccurate, but which doesn't have the rough edges knocked off it in the way that music does on vinyl.

The black art of vinyl mastering is becoming increasingly rare. You have to do certain things to the sound in order to compensate for the effects of vinyl playback. Since the advent of the CD, records sound different, and not better. Nobody seems to try to do anything to mitigate the effects of digital playback - whether it be poor digital-analogue converters or just that ringing harshness that can get on your nerves after a while.

And it's not news, is it, that MP3 or AAC, compressed files of any filetype, sound even worse, thinner and harsher, than CD.

But it's not just that that puts me off the iPod. It's the whole walking around with headphones/earbuds thing. Alongside the people who insist on taking every call on their mobile and answering every text, you find yourself essentially surrounded by people who are cocooned in a private world upon which you cannot impinge.

And the whole style of listening, loading up a terabyte of tracks and just letting it wash over you on random play - that's not my style at all. It's a long way from the adolescent mix-tape of old, isn't it? The one you laboured over for hours, getting the gaps between tracks just right, fitting as close to 45 minutes of music per side as possible. Even if you weren't doing it for some girl/boy, you were doing it for yourself, to audition, to play back.

Getting things in the right order - that used to be important. Themes, question/answer tracks. Things being related. Now people like to pretend that their iPod knows what its doing, that "random isn't really random", and Apple have even put a slider into iTunes so you can adjust the level of randomness. Why did careful planning and attention to detail suddenly get such a bad name?

I miss those days, the mix-tape days. While making mix-tapes for women has to be among the most pathetic and annoying things that men do, I can't help being a man, and I couldn't help enjoying it.

Increasingly old-fashioned and out of touch, that's me. But I come with a guarantee: when you're with me, our conversation will never be interrupted by my phone, and I won't even have one earbud in any of the holes in my head. And if you're in the car with me, I'll almost certainly switch off the radio/CD player so we can talk.