Rambler said:
On topic - when it comes to listening to music while travelling/mowing the lawn etc, what advantage does the iPod really have over a walkman/MD?
I've been through the lot from a WM2, to discman, to MD, to a 32mb MP3 player to a 40 GB iPod.
Funnily enough I don't use the iPod to re-discover old stuff, I use it to find totally new stuff and fill it
with MP3s found on the net (mostly legal free stuff) and mixtapes/pirate sessions.
As Gutter says, broadband and MP3 is the enabler.
6 months on I have only encoded a handful of my CD collection (encoding takes 10 minutes or so for each CD).
As for the number of tunes etc. It's great to have all that space - but if you carry a "blogger-dad-shoulder-bag"
there is no great advantage to the iPod over having a tiny MD player and a small file of MDs.
An advantage for me personally is that is also a portable USB hardrive. So I can carry all sorts of files on it -
and show some of them on the iPod itself (like the list of stuff I should check out the next time I am in a proper record shop).
Sound quality is as good or similar to MD, it's very hard to hear a difference from 160kBps upwards.
I guess one other advantage is the iPod economy - ie all the power supplies, cables, car hi-fi sets etc around it.
Like many I did NOT want an iPod (because of the smugness I associated with it) -
but after going to the shop and looking at the competition (the player iRiver had at the time was just too ugly. I like well designed shit like the Sony WM2 and my Panasonic MDs) and playing
around with the players I still decided to get an Ipod. Get some proper (black) cans to use on the move, and you don't look like a jerk (although for my wife the white headphones is almost the point of it ...).
I've come to like iTunes - although the first few releases for Windows were unusable.
The podcasting interface is pretty much a beta, the rest is good.
It's a shame iTunes does not have a 100% open interface
and that Sony sink their stuff with DRM. In an ideal world I would want a Sony/Panasonic (Jap) MP3
player and use iTunes to manage the library (and playlists - a feature I thought I would not use, but
I now am). It's a shame Sony totally mismanaged the possibilities with hi-MD - it could have been
a contender.
Bad: much worse battery than a decent MD-player, no FM radio (would have been useful a couple of weeks ago here in London), no line-in or recording function (so no easy way to get those old LPs over), price is high (but similar to other MP3 players with similar hard disk sizes), no remote and can't get a black one (no way am buying an U2-badged player).