When I grow old enough, I am surely growing to drop this on my kids. I have spent my entire childhood listening to the troubles my parents and grandparents had to go through. Even with the simplest of tasks like: going to school. “You Kids Have it Easy These Days“, they used to say. Let’s uncover my version of these problems.
Struggle Was Real:
These days, Bluetooth is our go-to technology for wireless music, file transfer (dying fast). But kids these days won’t know the infrared struggles.
Or, melee to play music from your phone on a device that would just not support Bluetooth. We had one such bad boy at home. My dad bought a very cool bathing shower kind of thingy with a small console attached to it, back in 2004. It had lights, different shower modes and FM to listen to music. It also featured Bluetooth with one of those Chinese voices which would say, “The Bluetooth is Now Ready to Use”, but in reality, it never was. I would spend hours in the bathroom trying to configure that thing.
The Eureka Moment:
One fine day, I was playing around with my mother’s phone when I found an app called FM Transmitter. I had no prior knowledge of what that thing was and what it did. It had a simple UI which asked me to define a frequency. That was all.
Google wasn’t your right hand man for each query those days. So we had to resort to lengthy, boring manuals. I caught hold of one and realized that I have struck a gold mine.
FM transmitter would simply transmit phone’s audio to a custom frequency. All devices in the vicinity of the phone and capable of receiving FM waves would play your phone’s music.
Road to Stardom:
Soon enough, I was found hosting lit parties with my family as audience. 90s songs, Bhajan, Backstreet Boys, you name it. Those big ass cassette players, supporting FM, were now dancing to my tunes. I even convinced some of my friends that I ran a FM channel.
No prizes for guessing, that shower wasn’t spared either. Tune into a cheesy Bollywood number (of course downloaded from songs.pk), transmit and spend hours bathing.
Conclusion:
Although technology has grown leaps and bounds in these couple of decades, I feel that simplicity of likes of FM transmitter has been lost. In the run for thinnest and lightest phones we have dropped this amazing piece of hardware. I understand that Gen-Z kids may not be as amused with the idea of remotely playing music. But that was a really dope thing to do back then.
Until Next Time. . .
