#“The Technical Magic of Playing a Song in Our Car in 2011”
In the olden days (as my kids call the 90s), we turned on the radio in the car and played music or stuck a tape in a tape deck. In recent years we'd plug a phone, iPod or USB stick into a car stereo. Now we are messing with streaming more. It's still as patchy as hell in Ireland with all the mobile blackspots on our motorways but we had a reasonable amount of success yesterday doing the M8-M7-M3 run.
Sidenote: And what a marvellous road that M3 is. Anyone not using it on principle? Nah,didn'tthink so.
As we lashed along the M3, with each of us calling out songs to play next, I realised we were using a huge amount of technology to get Led Zeppelin, Rock and Roll, playing out through the car speakers. Here's a diagram of it.
The two key bits are Bluetooth A2DP to the car stereo and my HTC Sensation acting as a Wifi portable hotspot so the youngfella wouldn't incur any mobile data charges. Apart from the odd bit of buffering, we reached Cavan with Queens of The Stone Age, No One Knows, at top volume.
I think it's good to stop everyone once in a while and marvel at the magic of all of this. My first job was writing code for a GSM basestation and there were thousands of people involved in just that. Think about every piece of the mediadeliverychain and how many people were involved in creating it. We humans can be pretty awesome sometimes.
Oh and this was the top tune in our car, played over and over on the trip. A soundtrack you should definitely buy. A bajillion times better than the dire movie.
Happy Christmas!