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| I know I still have a home-made 8-track tape somewhere, but I couldn't find it. However, I have a gazillion cassette tapes. |
As I was curling my hair the other morning and rocking out to Journey, I looked down at my iPad and noticed I have 16,127 minutes of music stored. My first thought- I wonder how many hours and then days of music I had. That reminded me of my pre-iTunes days, when we listened to albums and I would make mixes on 8-tracks and later, cassettes.
One of the things that annoyed me on 8-tracks or cassettes was when I bought a tape and they would split a song from one side to the other. That was just not acceptable! So, of course, I had to make sure that any tape I made (1) would use the maximum amount of music I could squeeze in per side and (2) would NEVER cut a song in half! This is where the math came in.
First, the playlist from multiple albums was formed, along with all the times for each song. Next, I would estimate, time-wise which songs would work best for each side to use up the allotted space. Then, I had to add all the times, minutes separated from seconds. After that, I had to convert all the seconds into minutes and seconds, rearranging the playlist as necessary. Each song needed some space in between so songs didn't bleed together and I accounted for that, as well. I've been known, on more than one occasion, to re-record a tape that was less than perfect. (No one that really knows me would be the least bit surprised by this. ;) )
I know this sounds like a lot of work, but I loved it! However, I don't miss it and have become quite content to use drag and drop. iTunes does a really nice job of letting me know what songs will fit on a CD, when I burn one for my car. (Can you believe they added USB hookups for iPods the year after I bought my car??!!! Arghhhh!) Now all I have to do is figure out how many songs will fill it up to the last few seconds of play time!
Here's a free classroom activity, so your students have the opportunity to experience how we (well, maybe not you) had to do it in the 'olden' days. Click HERE to pick up a copy of this free download, then stop back and let me know how it worked for you.
And for those of you who are waiting with bated breath to find out how many hours and minutes of music I have stored on my iPad, I've done the math for you: 268 hours, 47 minutes of a very eclectic musical mix in my library. This, according to the bottom of my iTunes page (and I verified it) works out to be roughly 11.1 days of music. (Actually, it's 11.166666666,...which should round to 11.2 days, but I guess I'll let it slide.)
What's on your awesome playlist?
"When you get a grove going, time flies." Donald Fagan, Steely Dan
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