Abbee Road

Back in the early-70s. while still living at home in suburban Chicago, I would practice a very crude (yet technically legal) form of music piracy. I would lock myself in my bedroom, tune in WXRT or WDAI on my transistor radio, and line up my portable cassette recorder right next to the speaker. And there I would wait until the first cue that a favorite song was starting. With lightning-fast precision, I would lock down the Play and Record buttons.

And just hope I didn’t miss too much of the intro.

Naturally, just about every song I captured included voice-over by an idiotic DJ prattling on about the weather, why the Cubs lost again, and his general awesomeness. And it was always tough knowing when to punch Stop, because stations were prone to bleeding one song into the next (and it was usually one you didn’t want anyway). The result was a home-made tape of botched attempts to steal music so I could avoid buying records.

I am so thankful now to be way beyond the Stone Age of personal music libraries. Like most people, I just carry my tunes with me in my pocket. So imagine my gasp when I read about the Abbee. It’s a base station with a plug-in portable unit that can record songs off the FM airwaves, and magically remove the commercials. Take the portable player with you and have up to 500 songs sans advertising.

Wait a minute. Did I just say 500 songs? Wow. Let’s all take 10 steps back in time. My first Rio MP3 player could hold 128MB worth, which was about 40 songs. Back then the Abbee’s storage capacity would have been a godsend. But today it is a retro-grouch’s dream come true.

Especially when you consider that there are no computers involved in this exchange. None. At all.

Let me tell you what I really think. This is an iPod for morons. There. So sue me.

Sure, parent corporation Myine intentionally markets the Abbee as a product for Baby Boomers who have yet to acquire fire in their arsenal of tricks. It’s for the Metamucil-sucking, Jitterbug-dialing technophobes we love to ridicule. And the problem is that you’re still going to get the same crappy recordings I did with my cassette player 38 years ago. We’re talking FM, guys…not streaming audio. Not digital downloads. No static at all? Ha!

Worse yet, this is no plug-and-play device. Abbee wants to ease into her new task, so it takes 24 hours to “profile” your listening before it starts serving up tunes. Want to add another station? Add another 24 hours. And Abbee still won’t be able to quiet the DJ trying to cram a station ID into the mix before the first lyric is uttered. All this, and for only $250.

I’m sorry, this is one of the silliest new products I have seen in a long time. Why anyone would want to turn back the pages of technology is beyond me. About the only thing I miss from that era is the excitement of discovering new artists…like Jimmy Buffett (WXRT would play Why Don’t We Get Drunk And Screw when no one else dared) and Lynyrd Skynyrd (thereby giving rise to millions of Freebird-shouting drunks the world over).

Otherwise, I have erased that tape. My music is dear; Abbee isn’t. Hit the Stop button now.

Dr “Watch Out For That Pothole” Gerlich