The Death Of The Mixtape, Or Why iPods Suck At Parties

Even as recently as a few years ago, I would usually put together a collection of rockin' tunes every time we had a few friends gathering at our place. For years and years, they were usually recorded to cassette, and I was always careful to maximize the levels to tape to facilitate smooth transitions from one song to the next.

Maybe there was something about the natural tape compression, or the inherent limitations of the media, but I never remember having to adjust volume levels or EQ settings once the tape was rolling.

However, I have a radically different experience these days when I set up a playlist on my iPod to use our parties.

I'll admit you can't beat the convenience of being able to endlessly reshuffle and add or delete songs to your "mixtape" on the fly. Laying down a good mixtape used to take hours; now I can get my iPod to do the same thing in seconds.

But the main problem I have with the iPod is the variation of audio levels and frequency response from one song to the next. Even using their "soundcheck" feature, it still seems like some songs on the playlist are barely audible, while some are overbearingly loud. Additionally, some songs now seem to have an overabundance of bass, while some sound flat and lifeless when sequenced consecutively on the playlist.

As a former audio engineer, I know that every recording is different, and that some CDs today are mastered to maximize every dB that they can squeeze onto the disc. But there has to be more to it than that. For some reason, the process of converting a CD to an mp3 file seems to subtly change the original file in such a way that amplifies the differences between recordings to a significant enough degree that they now become noticeable when played back-to-back.

As I said earlier, you can't beat the iPod for flexibility, or ease of use. But Apple needs to figure out a way to let us enjoy ourselves at our own parties, without having us get up every five minutes to turn the volume up or down on our stereos, or roll off or boost the bass on every other song we hear.