Ipodding

Wow, two posts in one day. This is a record for me. Must be a slow day at work.

If you ask anyone who knows me, I am a techie. I'm always fiddling with some electronic device. Always have been, always will. And, I love to listen to music. When I was young, it was the tape recorder or the family record player. In the 80's, my first "walkman" was around 2 pounds, had a shoulder strap and took cassettes like a car tape deck. It ate tapes as much as it played them. The 90's came with more money to spend on that kind of thing. First it was the walkmans, real ones this time. Then the CD players. Multidisk CD players, minidisk players, DVD players, etc. After the turn of the century I found myself with a small MP3 player with expandable memory that I bought for $100. With the extra memory I could bring 8-9 CDs with me while I was out.

Last summer I came into some money and decided to purchase an Ipod for myself. I had 3 choices. The Ipod mini, the 20GB Ipod, or the 40GB Ipod. Since I have a fairly good sized CD collection, and my wife has quite a few as well, I went for the 40GB version. Along with that, I got myself a cradle for my car to recharge the Ipod and play the music through my car stereo.

So far I've recorded every CD I have into the pod and around half of my wife's CDs and I still have over 15GB free on it. It was more money than I have ever spent on any music player ($400) and so far it has been worth every penny. I can setup custom playlists. It automatically sorts through everything by artist, album & song title. It was easy to setup and easy to convert all my CDs to it. It can read any MP3 file and I had 4 CDs filled with MP3 files to use with it. It's very convenient to carry around any piece of music I own and have all of it a few keystrokes away. I can re-listen to old albums I have not pulled out in a while. I can shuffle randomly through my entire collection or just through one artist, genre, etc. I love it!

Before I purchased it, I was browsing through different review websites to figure out which large capacity MP3 player was best. I looked at C|Net, Tom's Hardware Guide, and a few others. Each of these sites had reviews on Ipods and on other devices from Sony, Dell, Creative Labs, etc. What really made up my mind was that each review for a product that was not an Ipod had this line at the end: "A well designed effort with good sound and options, but it's not an Ipod." That kind of sealed the deal. Heck, my family became an Ipod family since my wife got one for Christmas. She liked mine so much she wanted her own so I got her a pink Ipod mini with a nice laser inscription on the back.

The only problem I have now is all the music I used to have before CDs. I had a large cassette tape collection but I gave that up when I got divorced. Though I like to look for new music to listen to at the stores, I find that I start to find music I used to have. However, replacing old tapes to CDs can be an expensive process.