New Toy Time

Speaking of disposing of income: I caved and bought an iPod, Apple's MP3 player, a couple of weeks back. Daniel shared that he coveted one some 16 months ago when they were first released, and I started seriously entertaining thoughts of one last December, when Apple's online store started selling refurbished (but fully warranted) 5 GB versions for $100 off. Those sold out before I stopped wavering. So when they released 10 GB ones at a similar discount (and including a remote and belt-clip case), I pounced. (And good thing, too, because 20 GB ones are now there, and still priced too steep for me.)

Apple claims that 10 GB is about 2,000 songs. Your mileage may vary, of course. I've probably got around 8 CD's in there so far and I think i've used 1 GB. A couple of tracks are AIFF's (the Mac's native, uncompressed equivalent of WAV for the uninitiated) and are eating up extra space, but I want to keep them around for CD-burning. A little tiny bit of space is also taken up by my calendar and address book, which synch with my Palm every time I HotSync at home.

Moving songs to the iPod is fast: it takes about 20 seconds to move an entire CD from Mac to iPod. Encoding songs from CD to the computer in 160-bit MP3, not so fast. The downside of having a 4-year old combo CD-DVD drive is that I'm maxxing out at around 4x encoding, meaning it takes about 20 mintues to encode the average CD. But I am loving the ability to leave out the "dog" tracks — the ones I skip every time I play a CD.

Entertaining side-note: when opening the box, the iPod is wrapped in a clear protective label, with the words "Don't steal music" in 4 different languages over the screen, kind of like Note 6 on the bottom of this page.