A few years ago, while amassing the 65gb of mp3s I now possess, I was a huge fan of the massive winamp playlist. You know the one. It’s irresistable to make one of these - a playlist with say, hundreds or even thousands of songs within it.
My thing was “mood.” I’d try to make massive playlists that matched a certain mood I’d want to experience. So playlists called “mellow”, “angry,” and “fun” began developing. While exclusively listening to music this way, I wondered idly about whether mp3 was a signifier of the death of the album. Back in the days of the LP, the 8 track, the cassette, and the CD, the only way to mix and match music was to create mix tapes or to use 6 disc CD changers. Otherwise, you were left with hearing the songs in the order the original artist wanted you to hear them.
Now, of course, it’s much different. We can now hear CD quality music in any damn order we please, and even, if we want, become our own DJs, beatmatching and mixing wildly diverse material with home studio programs - as b00mb0x is already a testament to. Coincidentally, the recording industry itself was already becoming single obsessed, often paying no attention to their rich, back archive of albums and album oriented artists and instead gearing into being a business that was set up to sell 5-6 mega-pop star artists and their singles every year. The album these singles came packaged in was merely a wrapper for pretty pictures and some crap(ier) fluff songs that came in between the 2-3 singles.
What is interesting about the age of the mp3 download is that now, instead of having to work to break out of an album and artists tracklisting, you have to work to maintain it. The impulse of mp3 software is to mix and match. If you want an album, you are probably going to have to work a fair amount at organizing your mp3 collection to create the acutal albums themselves - and then teach your software to play it in the correct order every time and with ease. As this becomes more and more the way we all listen to music, the artistic death of the album does indeed become a likely possibility.
Personally, I thought I was happy about this turn of events. Which is why I’m surprised by how much I enjoy 1by1.
1by1 comes from a deceptively simply premise. It shows you, on the left side of the screen, a Windows Explorer type interface. Then, on the left, it lists all the mp3s in the folder you’ve clicked on. It’s not pretty, but it’s damn intuitive and easy. Here’s a screenshot:

As you can see… it’s not pretty. But if, like me, you’ve already organized your mp3 collection into folders by artist and then by album, 1by1 converts you into being an album freak again - because in 1by1, it’s easiest to listen to one artist at a time, and one album at a time.
Better still, 1by1 is one of the few players left that is not a resource hog. This thing doesn’t want to burn cds for you, it doesn’t want to rename your entire mp3 collection from the cddb, it doesn’t want to take your mother out to dinner - it simply wants to play your mp3s - 1 directory at a time. Minimum requirements? A 100mhz processor. If you don’t have a 100mhz processor then… I don’t understand how you’re reading this. Hadn’t they not invented the World Wide Web when people were using 486s?!
So nowadays, I’m relying on two players. The relatively resource light Winamp 2.85, which you can still get at oldversion, for when I want to do those cool, massive playlists, and 1by1 for when I want to simply… hear an album. I’m tending to use 1by1 a lot more. Let’s face it, individual artists, you know, real artists, not spoiled no talent bastards like that Simpson kid, spend a lot of time working on albums and figuring out the best way to deliver you an emotional and interesting experience. Your Winamp or iTunes “Shuffle” button does not do anywhere near as good a job.
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