How many times did I find that the volume steps on the phone were too large and the music would either feel too loud or too soft. Some time ago I found an app for that! It’s called Fine Volume Control and works on iPhone and iPad – LINK. Each step is about a fifth or sixth of a iPhone volume step and when I toggle on Precision there is even more graduation, ten times finer. (= a 50th of a iPhone volume step). I like the new VU meter option that uses a “fader”. A real fader feels much better, of ourse, but hey, I’m happy to have this!  :-)

I found the following quotes in an article on production-expert.com – LINK

A stream costs nothing to start or abandon. Skip it, half-listen to it, let it run under a conversation. Nothing about the format asks anything of you, so nothing about the experience demands much back.

If the great internet experiment has proved anything, then it’s that ubiquity is overrated.

Ubiquity is overrated. That’s a good phrase to sit with for a while. I don’t want 300 guitars, I don’t even want 5 guitars. I don’t need nor want the choice. Limits are good for creativity.

A record works the other way round. You choose it before a note plays. You commit to a side, twenty-odd minutes, no skipping to the next hit, no shuffle logic overriding the sequence the artist or mastering engineer actually built. The friction is the feature. Remove it, as streaming has, and you remove the thing that made you pay attention in the first place.Streaming does the same thing to music. It plays, then disappears into the endless catalogue of songs you’ve half-listened to. There’s nothing to show you picked it, when you did, or why it mattered.

A record does the opposite. It sits on your shelf as proof, not proof of the music itself, since anyone can hear that, but proof that you chose it at a certain time for a certain reason. Maybe it played when you fell in love, when someone passed away, or when England won the World Cup (1966, by the way). After sixty years, that shelf becomes a timeline of your life, it’s almost like a musical, births, deaths, and marriages.

By the way, I could be talking about CD and cassette tapes here.
Streaming gives you every song, but no shelf to mark your moments.

That is all true. Unless you travel a lot or don’t want to be burdened with stuff… What made a big difference for me was to start playing music files I own rather than skipping around on the streaming platform. Streaming is only for discovery now. We have to create new rituals. Light an incenses stick and listen until it has burned down. I am surprised nobody has created an app that shows a turntable and when one selects a song from one’s albums the needle drops onto a platter and then all notifications are automatically paused and you can’t stop the music until the “side” is played.

This is true:

Vinyl Isn’t Technically Better. It’s Emotionally Better. That’s The Whole Point.

But we can create our own rituals, now that we understand that music without the investment of time is just sound.