So I recently stopped using YouTube Music as my primary source of music and pulled back out my old music player, a Walkman NW-A45 to be precise.
I thought it would be fun to share how I have been using it in order to be more intentional with music.
Music Discovery
One of the first decisions I made was that I have to be selective about what goes on here, when I want to listen to music I don’t want to be scrolling through a list of fluff and filler to get to something that fits my current vibe.
I have four major sources of music discovery.
- Music suggestions I receive from friends, either indirectly through group chats or directly.
- Video game music podcasts/playlists that have been put together by ordinary people, not an algorithm.
- Radio, typically internet radio due to poor reception.
- Going on a deep dive into a particular artists. For this purpose I actually keep YouTube Music around, albeit on a separate device (I’m part of a Premium family plan so I have it anyway).
Adding Music to My Library
But even then I don’t just add the things I find to the Walkman straight away, I have done that in the past and have found that there is some stuff I enjoy in the moment but not for the long term.
To help avoid this I created a system where if I think “I should put this on the Walkman” I note it down and tally how many times that thought crosses my mind. When I have reached 5 tallies on that album/song/soundtrack then I will add it to the Walkman (in the highest availability quality and, when possible, brought legitimately). In the interim I may add this stuff to YouTube Music for when I fancy a change of pace from what is in my library but don’t want the unpredictability of radio.
Playlists
I typically prefer listening to albums as, in most cases, the whole album in of itself is a piece of art, not just the individual tracks. But I do sometimes like to listen to playlists too (in some cases a good playlist can even be considered an art form in of itself, albeit a transformative one).
I decided to give myself a limit of 15 tracks per playlist, I can always make multiple volumes if I have many tracks that fit the theme. I figured that if most of the tracks in my library are between 2-4 minutes then that gives me playlists ranging from 30 minutes to an hour. For me personally this is the perfect sweet spot.
Podcasts & Audiobooks
I do also listen to podcasts on this thing. The Walkman has a Language Study mode that is kept separate from your music library.
This preserves the position in the last played audio track regardless of whether I listen to music between playing it, and it has extra buttons in the player for skipping back 10 or 3 seconds and forwards 5 seconds. Meaning it does not take much effort to repurpose this for podcasts and Audiobooks.
I use the internal 16GBs of storage for this as I don’t need a lot of storage for this purpose, and can then keep my SD Card solely for music. I then just have to setup the podcast feeds in GPodder on my computer and point the program to the correct folder on the Walkman for syncing. It can even detect when I have deleted an episode on the Walkman and mark I as played in GPodder when syncing.
to the tracks I liked, creating a playlist of those tracks, and hitting shuffle. I’m very much stuck in the “old man listening to music from his young adult years.” But at least it is all music I own.