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Patrick Riley
John, you bring back many memories. I plead guilty to being too wrapped up in "our" music. I work from my home office every day but listen continually to my well curated personal music collection in the background.
In high school, we always tuned in KOMA when the sun went down. As I recall, most Roswell radio stations played "hillbilly" music; we were all to cool for that!
Was it XEG radio? I remember tuning in XERF from Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico (across from Del Rio). It was one of the original, and maybe the first "border blaster" stations. I also tuned it out when the preachers came on.
You're in a coveted position having a transistor radio. That was the iPhone of its day and you definitely turned heads if you owned one. I, unfortunately, did not ... above my pay grade!
A shared FYI ... more and more lately, I'm listening to Amazon Music rather than my own collection. I started ripping CDs to MP3s in 1998 when the first MP3 players came out (mine was the Diamond Rio 300 ... it would hold all of about 150 tracks if they were ripped in low quality). At the time, I had 5,800+ CDs and ripped all those. Then I started to download music from the sharing sites (like Napster and others). Next I started buying digital music from eMusic, Amazon, Google Music, MP3Sparks, and many others. My MP3 collection currently has about 407,000 tracks.
And why am I moving away from my own collection? I found Amazon Music Unlimited (AMU). A few FYIs about this service:
1) AMU currently has 90,000,000 tracks ... makes my collection seem absolutely puny. They continue to add tracks ... soon will be at 100,000,000. No ads, of course.
2) It's cheap at as little as $3.99 a month (one user, one device) to $14.99 a month for a family (up to 6 simultaneous users, unlimited devices).
3) Music is ultra high quality surpassing the music quality from a CD (Amazon calls it "HD quality sound").
4) A special surround sound mode (Amazon calls it "Spacial Audio") is supported ... obviously this is optimized with suitable multi-speaker configurations but works on even a single speaker.
5) Play AMU on anything, phone, computer, tablet, smart watch, smart devices, etc.).
6) Download songs of your choice to play on your devices when Internet service is not available.
7) Supports creations of your own "playlists" of favorite tracks.
8) Display synchronized lyrics (on devices with screens) for most tracks. I particularly like this!
9) Cover art display (again on devices with screens).
10) Operated by voice commands on Amazon and many other devices. My most favorite feature!
11) Fuzzy or precise voice command support. I can say "Alexa play song name" and AMU chooses most popular version; "Alexa play song name by artist name" plays version by named artist; "Alexa play song name by artist name from album name" gets you the exact version you want. Subsets of the above, of course, are supported; "Alexa shuffle songs by artist name"; "Alexa play album name"; etc.
12) All kinds of command variations like "Alexa shuffle classic rock music from the 60s"; "Alexa play music from World War I"; "Alexa play bagpipe music"; "Alexa shuffle college fight songs"; "Alexa shuffle Music Box top hits from 1962"; etc.
13) And, seemingly black magic nto me, you can request a song if you just know a few words of the lyrics ... example "Alexa play the song with the lyrics 'all my bags are packed'" and AMU will play I'm Leavin' on a Jet Plane ... pretty cool!
14) Music info anytime when listening to a song you don't recognize just say "Alexa song info" to get artist, song and album information.
15) Millions of podcasts also on AMU.
Another FYI ... despite AMU having 90,000,000 tracks I occasionally can't find a song I want to hear ... example Pinto the Wonder Horse is Dead by Tom T. Hall. Note that AMU does have this title by other artists. Perhaps I'm being too picky.
Anyway AMU coupled with an Alexa device ... highly recommended.
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