How many of you have listened to music on cassette player walkmans? This was not too long ago, i used them about 15 years back. Since, the progress in the music players has been tremendous. Read my earlier post about the music players i have used over the years. Nowadays a portable music player with gigabytes of memory is very common, but listening to my favorite music, at the instant of thought, is still a pain.
In one of my earlier post i’ve made my point that i don’t need more than 1GB of space for my music, but now i beg to differ. I don’t want even 1GB. I don’t want any space on my player. I just want it to play the music i think of. Yes, that’s right. I think of a song, and the player should start playing.
Why should i always choose from a pool of 1GB or 80GB or 160GB or even 1TeraByte of songs? What if i feel like listening to a 1960s number that i’d have heard only a hymn of? The vaguely remembered tune haunts me. Where can i get that song?? It’s not there in the pile of 10000 songs i manage. Someone ought to have it!
I hate downloading music to my portable player every time i get bored of the playlist i have. I hate to search for a particular song. I want to listen at that moment, and searching for it might spoil my mood.
I want someone to have all possible music ever composed, remixed or copied and stream it over the internet in real time. Someone could be one or a group of music companies. I don’t want to ‘own’ any song, but play whenever i want and as many times i want. My portable player (reduce it just to a quality headphones or speaker system) should be able to request and get a song within milliseconds from a server at any corner of the world.
We need an algorithm to map our thought, kind of brain signals, and vaguely available information of that song to something comparable, then match it with a ‘probable list’ of few thousand songs, identify the song we want correctly, and play for us. The algorithm and the devices involved sounds improbably complex, but i feel this is how the music players of future should be. In many ways, such a service can curb piracy and I don’t mind paying for such a service or technology, do you? :)
It sounds like i’m asking for too much, isn’t it?
Not really. I know it will be a reality some day, but the question is how long will it take? I feel it should not take more than a decade or maximum two for such a service to be accessible by everyone at a nominal cost. One of my colleagues said ‘it would be impossible for such a service to come up in 10-15 years’. He felt it’s not possible for me to listen to music on such a service in my lifetime.
In 15 years, if i am able to graduate from cassette player walkman to a portable music player, which can download music on WiFi, such a technology too should be a reality soon.
What do you think, plausible? :)