The days are numbered August 26, 2006
Posted by Patrick in : Music , trackbackSince my car was broken into last March, I have been without music in my car for quite some time. Sometimes, it’s refreshing to drive in relative silence. It gives me time to call a friend, or to pray out loud. And with the recent popularity of hands-free cell systems, I don’t look completely crazy to my fellow daily commuters.
But then, my recent obsession of the Talking Heads rears its head. Or the latest Keller series itches my brain. These and many other reasons have slowly eroded my built-in defenses to this new technology: the portable mp3 player. Maybe it’s not that new. But like most technology, I’m behind the times and need some advice.
Some of my reasons for not jumping on the bandwagon in the past was the loss of the physical album. With mp3s you miss the cover art and liner notes. Plus, working in software all day, I think my hands are starved of physical contact with anything (except of course, the keyboard). I think part of my interest in starting a darkroom, and not jumping to digital, was that the whole process was chemical and physical. It’s completely hands-on. With digital, I’m yet again relegated to manipulating bits on a computer screen. Albeit, in a much different way.
At any rate, the pros for an mp3 player outweigh the cons. It’d be great to have all your music in one portable place. I can have access to all my music at my home, or the office, or the car (or my bike, but I’d be a little fearful of that). As Colin has touted, emusic seems to be a great service. And I just learned that you always have access to songs that you purchase via their website. So, you don’t have to worry about archiving your music.
So does anyone have any thoughts on the player? Should I be yet another person with a pair of white earbuds? Or are other players just as good? Colin bought his iPod because of the AAC format. I know others have bought it because of its compatibility with iTunes. But, there’s a 20GB iRiver on craigslist for $100. Any thoughts??
Comments»
What player you should get depends on how you plan to use it. If you’ll be ripping your own CDs and downloading things from eMusic, you can get pretty much any player you want, since basically every player can play MP3. All of the music on eMusic is in MP3 format and if you rip all your music to MP3 you’ll be all set. If you’re interested in using the iTunes Music Store, you’re stuck with some type of iPod. If you want some sort of subscription service like Yahoo, then you’re stuck with a WMA player, which is basically everything that’s not an iPod.
Then, you need to decide whether you want the ability to record via a microphone or line in jack. Many MP3 players have this capability. In addition, many players have an FM tuner and the ability to record off the radio. However, iPods do not have these capabilities out of the box. I think you can buy add-ons for these things but iPods are pretty expensive to start with and you’d need to pay extra for features that are included automatically on other players. That said, the user interface for the iPod is really easy to use, to a large extent because the iPod doesn’t try to do a lot of extra stuff beyond playing music.
You mentioned that you were thinking of setting up a Linux box at home. Before you make a decision on your music player, you should look at Linux support and programs you could use for managing your music library in Linux. This may take some digging - or maybe you could pick up a Linux enthusiast magazine at Borders or something. I use Windows and iTunes, so I don’t really know what’s available. If it’s a big pain to transfer music (or podcasts) to your music player in Linux, you’ll be pretty frustrated. I mention podcasts because our church publishes our pastor’s sermons online as podcasts every week and you can set up your computer to automatically download the new sermon every week. You could probably do the same with the Tim Keller sermons.
Hmm. This is getting pretty lengthy. Maybe you should just give me a call and we can talk things through a little.