All My Songs

By JIM TOSONE

2002

The NOMAD Jukebox. Curved surfaces of matte silver and slate-blue metal that fit in the palm of my hand. But any resemblance to a portable Sony Discman is completely coincidental. There’s no lid to open, no place to pop in a single audio CD. Instead, the Jukebox’s built-in, 20-gigabyte hard drive plugs into my PC and pleads, “feed me MP3’s.” So over the course of many weekends I cheerfully have, to the tune of 4925 rock songs on 425 CDs by 165 artists.

Want to hear some Beatles? Click on Artists, scroll to Beatles, and pick from any of 219 songs—from A Day in the Life to Your Mother Should Know. In the mood for 40 hours of hard rock? Click on Genres, scroll to Hard Rock, hit play and listen to Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, and dozens of others.

But the Jukebox is nearly full, and my classical and jazz CD collections will need their own. Do I buy a second Jukebox, or wait for the 40-gigabyte version? Either way, I think differently about my audio recordings now that a wall-unit filled with CD’s is literally at my fingertips. With the Jukebox, my days of burning CD’s are over. I now mix songs, artists, and genres on the fly in ways that would make Moby and Björk jealous. And all my songs are with me always.