Richard spent most of 1998 to 2006 ripping CDs.
He was methodical about it. He had a good drive, good software, and opinions about bit rates that he would share with anyone who asked and several people who didn't. By the time he finished — or rather, by the time he stopped, because you never really finish — he had somewhere north of seven hundred albums encoded in lossless format on a network drive in his home office. FLAC files, mostly. Some ALAC. His entire relationship with music, from the Beatles records he'd inherited from his father to the jazz he'd discovered in his forties to some embarrassing classic rock he kept meaning to remove but never did.
Then streaming arrived, and like most people he drifted toward convenience. Spotify. A playlist someone else had made. The algorithm's choices. He still subscribed — it had its uses — but somewhere along the way he stopped listening to his own collection. Seven hundred albums. Four thousand three hundred and twelve tracks. Sitting there. Fully paid for. Not playing.
The problem wasn't access. He could open a file browser and find anything he owned within about forty-five seconds. The problem was something more like decision fatigue. Staring at a grid of album covers and having to choose felt like work. What he missed, though he wouldn't have put it this way at the time, was the experience of being surprised by his own music. Of hearing something he hadn't chosen.
"I had four thousand songs. I kept listening to the same forty."
What MemoryStream offered Richard was not complicated to explain. It took everything on his network drive — every album, every track — and made it available through a music player on his phone that understood shuffle the way shuffle should work: not randomly in the sense of arbitrarily, but randomly in the sense of genuinely unpredictable, with memory. It remembered where it had left off. It remembered what it had already played. It never repeated a track until it had worked through the whole collection.
But the feature that stopped him cold — the one he didn't expect — was the DJ.
He had set up MemoryStream on a Sunday morning, more or less as a technical exercise, and he had left it playing while he made breakfast. A track ended. There was a brief pause. Then a calm, unhurried voice said: "That was 'Kind of Blue' — 'So What,' specifically — by Miles Davis, recorded in 1959. One of the best-selling jazz albums in history, though Miles Davis apparently found that distinction mildly embarrassing. Next up, something from Bill Evans."
Richard stood at the stove with a spatula and didn't move.
That was it. That was exactly it. Not an advertisement. Not a segue into something he hadn't asked for. Not a personality performing at him. Just a sentence or two of context — the kind of thing a knowledgeable friend says when a song comes on at a dinner party — and then the music.
After a few weeks, the DJ announcements got more personal. Not because Richard had entered anything — he hadn't — but because MemoryStream had been keeping quiet track of what he'd played and when. One morning it said: "That was 'Graceland' by Paul Simon. You haven't heard this one in about three years, based on your play history. It came out in 1986 — the recording sessions in Johannesburg were controversial at the time but the album is now widely considered a landmark."
Three years. He hadn't thought about that album in three years. He'd owned it since 1987.
"It knew my library better than I did. Which, honestly, it should — it had been paying attention."
He started adding internet radio stations. A jazz station from New Orleans. A classical station from the BBC. He could mix them into a playlist with his local files — a few tracks from his own collection, a radio station for a while, back to his own music. The DJ handled all of it, noting when the source switched, giving context for whichever track had just played.
He also connected his Spotify account, not to replace his local library but to fill in the gaps. An album he'd always meant to buy but hadn't. A current artist a friend had recommended. MemoryStream would queue it alongside his FLAC files seamlessly, announce it the same way, treat it as part of the same listening session.
The best Richard could do to describe it to his wife was this: it felt like having a very good radio station that played only music he already owned, hosted by someone who had actually read the liner notes.
The photos were playing on the living room TV while he was in the kitchen. His music was playing through the speaker. When a track ended, the DJ said something quiet and moved on. He made another cup of coffee. He heard an album he hadn't heard in a decade. He heard it all the way through.
He doesn't think he would have chosen it. That, it turned out, was the point.