The Power of Denial

I've been doing some Raspberry Pi tinkering of late, messing with my desktop pi's configuration and what's plugged into what. As it turns out, this is the key to the mystery that's been bugging me these last couple weeks. I've been hearing music. Just little snippets, always of classical music. And this without my headphones on. So naturally, I'd check the headphones to see if my desktop mac's playing music from some website I didn't realize was so equipped. Nothing. Check the iPhone. On one occasion, it was the source, but that was music I recognized instantly as being part of my music collection. The little snippets of classical music persisted. I was to the point of thinking that, if one had to have auditory hallucinations, snippets of classical weren't unpleasant, or that someone working outside's music was being caught by the wind. For the most recent one, I glanced back at my Raspberry Pi. It couldn't be making sound. I'd unplugged it from my headphone amp. Could it? I took a closer look. That's when I noticed that I'd left one of my experiments plugged in. I had a set of earbuds plugged into the Pi. Sure enough, when I stuck one of the earbuds in my ear, I got classical music. I have MPD on my Pi. Like any good unix daemon, MPD starts at boot time and resumes whatever it was doing when it was stopped. Including playing music. I had MPD set up to stream from WCPE, a public radio station in North Carolina (Colorado Public Radio's streams are dreadful) specializing in ... you guessed it. Classical music. I was sure none of my computers were making music. I knew it wasn't coming through my headphone amp, because I'd checked. I knew my phone wasn't doing it, because I checked. I was sure it couldn't be any of my equipment, and I was about ready to call my doctor. Beware denial. "It couldn't possibly..." has a habit of becoming "verily, it could." Epilogue: I plugged the Pi back into my headphone amp, and I'm getting the music in my Sennheiser headphones now, in all its glory instead of little tinny snippets from an unknown source. Much better. -JRS