On the road

I travel a lot for our company and visit with audio clubs, customers and speak at a few of our dealers. When I go on these trips of course I want to play music and show off our equipment's features and share with people the joy of choosing from my library on an iPad. One of the cool things I love to do in these meetings is start by explaining what's going on, playing a track, and then handing the iPad over to one of the audience members. I make sure I choose one of the shy people who clearly have never had a chance to play with such a device in this setting. I am delighted as the person reluctantly takes the iPad, figures out how to use it in less than 1 second and then beams with delight as he plays his first track. Then everyone wants in and the iPad gets passed around the room. As a speaker, it's delightful to have most of my work handled for me by the folks that are attending the talk! To give a good demo I need to make sure I have the right music people want and I really want to make sure there's an impressive library to choose from. I travel with about 1000 albums, or 15,000 or so tracks. You might wonder how I transport this rather large library. I travel with nothing more than my laptop and a single 1tB USB hard drive. What I love about this hard drive is it has no power supply, not even a wire other than it's little USB cable. It's completely powered off the laptop and is smaller than a paperback book. It's called a Seagate Free Agent and you can see a photo of it here. The unit costs under $100 and slips into the back pocket of my jeans if need be. I gotta tell you, this is really the way to go when it comes to music storage. Tomorrow let's delve into building a music library.