Music (player) Musings

It's been awhile since I've posted and I'm not really sure what to write about so I'll just ramble...
I jumped on the MP3 player bandwagon several years ago. I got one of the early hard-disk players that came out after the first round of memory-based players. The unit I got, from Creative, had a 20 Gig hard drive and was about the size of a deck of flash cards. This thing held all of my songs - which were ripped from CDs onto my computer and downloaded to the player - and was great to use in the car or the bike while we had it. I never liked the idea of smaller capacity players that held 50 or 100 songs - a small fraction of my music library - because it meant that I had to decide, before I left the house (where the computer was that had the full library) which songs I was going to want to listen to that day. Its the same problem with having (even) a six disc CD changer in your car. For me anyway, I never know what I'm going to want to listen to so I'd have to take all my discs anyway. I love being able to call up any song, artist, or album I want, whenever I want to listen to it.

So the Creative player served me well for several years. In that time, the iPod exploded onto the scene and has become the de facto standard MP3 player. Nowadays, you can't go into a store and swing a cat without hitting a shelf of iPod accessories and they are getting better, smaller, and more feature packed. The latest craze is the addition of video. So now, you can carry around your movies, TV shows, and home videos along with your tunes. Of course, all these new features were putting my old Creative player further and further into the dark ages and I was getting the bug to move up. The other thing was that the Creative had a really tiny screen that I could barely see which made it rather dangerous to pick songs through while driving (not that I ever did that...)

So, I started looking at new players. As I posted earlier, I've been thinking about switching to a Mac as my computing platform and, of course the iPod is tailor made for Macs so there was that whole integrated solution thing going there. The iPod works with PCs too though so I could conceivably get an iPod and still stay with the PC. Actually, the whole Mac thing was kind of fading so that was less of a factor. The other option was a new player from Microsoft called the Zune. The big plus from the Zune was that it has a bigger screen which is a little better for watching videos. The downside of the Zune is that it is competing against a well-entrenched iPod base and all the accompanying accessories. Well, I went back and forth a bit and finally decided to get the Zune. I went down to the local Walmart and picked one up. I got it there because they have a 15 day return policy whereas other places will charge a restocking fee and I wanted to keep my options open in the event I wasn't thrilled with the Zune.

I should point out that the Internet is both the best thing for research into purchases and also the worst. It's great because you can get the information from lots of other people who have taken the plunge before you and have written up their thoughts. It's awful because you can get the information from lots of other people who have taken the plunge before you and have written up their thoughts. There seem to be an equal number of people who love and who hate any particular product. There are horror stories about virtually every product. This, of course, plays into my indecisiveness and practically paralyzes me in my decisions.

But anyway, I got the Zune and set it up, and liked it. I loaded my songs on it. I loaded some videos that I had made - and they looked great. All in all I was very pleased. But...

The whole iPod juggernaut was still weighing on me. There are more things geared to the iPod - cases, adaptors, speakers, airline power connectors, everything is iPod. Then, I saw that Amazon had Zunes for $50 less than I paid. I went back to Walmart to see if they would price match and they wouldn't. So, I returned the Zune, intending to just order it on Amazon and save $50. Just as I was about to click "Checkout", I stopped, canceled my order and ordered an iPod.

I got the iPod, set it up, loaded my music on it and liked it - basically. The iPod uses iTunes software on the PC to manage the music that gets loaded on the iPod and I hated it. It was slow and difficult to use. I then tried to transfer those same movies that looked so good on the Zune to the iPod and - no dice. The iPod uses a different video format than what Windows uses so you have to jump through some hoops to convert Windows media (video) to Apple media. Frankly, I'm just not that interested in jumping through the hoops. So, I sent the iPod back to Amazon and ordered another Zune.

Crazy huh? Ain't technology wonderful?