Unknown Artist\08 Track 8.wma

Okay, this one’s personal.

Over the years, if there’s been one thing that’s consistently been a part of my life, the thing that keeps me connected like an anchor (Inception style), it’s been my iPod! Before I get into how I modded one and built an automated pipeline to feed it music, we have to go back to why this little brick matters so much to me. Way back before I was even born.

Keeping Memory Alive

In West Africa, for centuries, my family carried a long history of service to the community. Traditionally, we are those responsible for the protection and stability of our society. It isn’t about “status” like we might picture it with a Western mindset, but a shared duty to remember where we come from and honor the traditions that hold our culture together.

In the West, preserving the past usually meant monuments: stone, built to stand still forever. We had those too, like the centuries-old earthen mosques and scholarly centers of Kong in northern Côte d’Ivoire, plus a rich tradition of manuscripts and symbolic scripts. But most of our history wasn’t meant to stand still. It was meant to travel with the people.

Spoken word carried family trees, alliances, and pacts from one generation to the next, anchored by music. When a musician plays the kora or the balafon, the melodies do real historical work: preserving genealogy, recording triumphs and failures, and keeping community values intact.

And because spoken words can shift over time, we also dyed our history into cloth. On Bogolanfini fabric, a specific arrangement of lines and dots serves as a proverb or a map of a family’s journey, a visual language that remains constant even as voices change.

So in my family, music was never just background noise. It was how memory moved around. Keep that in mind, because it explains a lot about why I’ve been carrying my music in my pocket ever since.

(A close-up of the kora on the left, and a musician playing in traditional patterned cloth on the right.)

90s ’til Infinity

Growing up, I was surrounded by “sounds”. I couldn’t put words on it back then: it could be the traditional instruments, the religious chants, the sounds of the market, the rhythm of Paris. All of these were part of the soundtrack of my life.

But those sounds really started talking to me when I was with my cousin. Back in the 90s, my cousin was The Guy, the most French/African/American guy you could ever meet! He had the latest gadgets, the most stylish clothes, and the coolest music. To my eyes, he was the definition of who I wanted to be when I grew up.

He and his two closest friends were the coolest trio in the neighborhood. Felt to me like they could overthrow the world. Always with a book and music in the background, that’s how I remember him. He was the one who introduced me to music and technology, and honestly the reason I’m still obsessed with both today.

Back then, when new music dropped in the States, in France you had to wait for the radio to play it. It could take months, even years, before you could hear the new song. But my cousin had a way to get the latest music before anyone else. He had connections to music producers and DJs who would give him the latest tracks like a beta tester for music.

He would get these tracks on tapes and play them in his car. I remember sitting in the backseat, listening to the music, and feeling like I was the fourth musketeer. I had access to a secret world of music that no one else knew about.

Downloading… 99% (Est. time left: 3 hours)

In the early 2000s, the music industry hit a massive crossroads, and Napster was the spark. The days of waiting for the radio or waiting on tapes from his contacts were suddenly over; he could just download whatever he wanted and play it right from his desk.

Back then, downloading in France felt like a legal gray area. Between debates around “l’exception de copie privée” and laws that hadn’t caught up yet, it wasn’t quite legal, but nobody was kicking doors down for it yet either. It was the Wild West of music, and my cousin and his friends were making the law!

And I was his audience of one. Whenever I went to his place, he would give me the choice: listen to the new tracks or play Driver as John Tanner on the PS1.

Of course, I always chose the music…

His room was a treasure trove of sound, and I was the lucky one who got to explore it. I could listen to the latest tracks and learn about computer technology at the same time. Around then he had built his own computer, and I was fascinated by how he could put all the pieces together and make it work. He would show me how to download music, how to use different software, and how to customize his computer, teaching me a language none of the adults around me spoke.

Then I broke his computer.

Because he was always upgrading something, that case was never closed. Side panel off, motherboard and cards out in the open, and me snacking right next to it. You can see where this is going. I spilled food straight into it.

I remember the fans speeding up loud, then all of a sudden the computer stopped working. I couldn’t turn it back on, and I felt like I had just destroyed a piece of art. I was SOOOOOO SCARED. While it was just a way to download music for me, for my cousin it was everything. To this day I still apologize to him for that.

After that incident, and my months of being grounded away from technology, my cousin implemented a new rule: no more music downloading for me. Only the PS1, or watching him on the computer. I guess I deserved it.

(How I must have looked watching my cousin on the computer after getting banned from touching it.)

256 MB and AAA batteries

After the computer incident, he would only let me listen to music on his Discman for a minute… while he upgraded to an iPod (2nd generation). It was the ultimate music player that DJs, music producers, and music lovers alike were raving about, and of course, as a tech enthusiast AND being around DJs, he had to have it.

That thing was on another level compared to the Discman. With a Discman, you were stuck with one CD at a time (and pray you didn’t bump it), whereas with the iPod he had a thousand tracks in his pocket and could pick any song on the spot like he was sitting at his computer. It was just the future.

I knew right then it was the beast I wanted when I grew up, but back in 2002 in France, an iPod went for 500 € to 600 €. At my age, that might as well have been the price of a house.

It took months, maybe even a couple of years, before I finally got my own player: one of those chunky USB stick MP3 players powered by a single AAA battery. It had 256 MB of storage. And when you only had 256 MB, every single megabyte meant the world to you. You had to carefully pick your top 20 tracks and listen to them on loop until you knew every second by heart.

Thanks to my cousin, I could bring that little USB stick over and swap the rotation every two or three months. Tracks came and went, depending on what he had downloaded and what I was into that season. But no matter how many times I wiped that 256 MB drive to make room for new music, there was one file I never deleted. I didn’t even know who made it or what the real title was. On that tiny backlit screen, it just scrolled across as:

Unknown Artist\08 Track 8.wma

That mystery file is what started my whole music-digging obsession, always hunting through crates, forums, and folders, hoping that one day I would finally find the artist, the track name, and the album behind Track 8.wma…