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Current Music: Ryan Adams 'Nobody Girl'

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I am considering procuring a 20GB iPod in the immediate future, however, as someone who doesn't have a particular fast connection at home, and doesn't have an Apple interface at all, I am rather skittish about the entire business, and so I turn to you lot. Tell me everything you think I should know.*

[Poll #589083]

*I have also been told that once you set up one computer as your base, you can't use other computers to upload your music without losing all the contents of your iPod. I have also been told there is a way around this. Educate me kids, because my base will not be a consistent thing, like, ever.

ETA: Thank you, all of you, for your assistance!

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I was thinking about the Nano, but it doesn't have enough memory for me.

I have also been told that once you set up one computer as your base, you can't use other computers to upload your music without losing all the contents of your iPod. I have also been told there is a way around this. Educate me kids.

*************

I don't know if there's a way around that but my sister uploaded all her songs onto her ipod at home, and then tried to load more at once she got back to her dorm room at college and it erased everything off her ipod. And Apple customer service you get one free phone call, and then it cost you 50 dollars for any more help.

I have a Dell Jukebox but dell's customer service sucks, and I've had to have the thing replaced twice cause the battery wouldn't last more then 2 hours. I think I finally have a good one. But yeah I wouldn't recommend either, guess that wasn't much help then huh? :)

Psychic. I told you no more drugs today.

Apple have actually just updated the iPod to take video. I am in the process commonly known as 'lusting' right now.

That's what I said too. I went from a 40GB iRiver to a 4GB iPod and I have never been as happy with a decision.

Yeah, when the first iPods came out, waaaaaay back in the day I'd planned to get one, but that whole separate versions/interafcing issues thing put me off. And then two years ago, I said, "Okay, this year," and that was the year of the battery issue.

*laughs*

I don't necessarily need a video iPod, but I wouldn't mind the one with the Slytherin logo on it.

Yeah, but Apple are selling TV shows and stuff on the iTunes Music Store. Before they come out in the UK. Oh yes. >:D

(If you don't care about video [what do you mean you don't care?], this also means that the previous generation of iPods is going really cheap right now.)

4GB? That's like 400 songs? That's not even 40 CDs!

I've got 790 on there at the moment and about half a gig free, actually.

I have the 30G iPod photo, which I love, but which I have to reformat every time I want to update it. I'm almost positive that it's because I have a bootleg version of Windows XP that I can't update with SP2. It makes my PC not recognize the iPod when I plug it in.

One other thing, it scratches really easily. If I could go back and do it over again, I wouldn't use it at all until I got a skin for it.

I rarely buy anything through iTunes, simply because it bugs the shit out of me that I can't share the files with other people except by burning them to disk. It's awesome for organizing your music though, and it doesn't give a rats ass whether you bought it from iTunes or not.

Yes, but the screen is so tiny, it'd be like looking at stick figures! Now if they started selling iPods with those big plasma screens they'd be on to something ;)

I have also been told that once you set up one computer as your base, you can't use other computers to upload your music without losing all the contents of your iPod. I have also been told there is a way around this.

This is not even a little bit true. Yes, you can set up your iPod to automatically sync with your computer so that you always have the same playlist on both, but this is a feature you can turn on and off at will. As long as this feature is not on, it will not do this with your computer or any other. You can add and subtract music at will, from any source.

Depends on your encoding size; my typical mp3s are around 3.5MB apiece; that means 1000+ songs, not 400. I don't even notice any quality difference between 128 and 192 (or whatever the higher number is), so I almost always rip a the lower encoding size. I have something like 3000 songs (including some really long-ass classical pieces) on my iPod and they only take up about 14GB of space. If you took out the long pieces, that works out to just under 1000 songs in 4GB.

See icon.

I have a 20GB Sony NWD3 player, which I chose after months of research. I was very quickly put off an iPod after talking to 2 dozen+ people and finding that well over three quarters of them were disatisfied with theirs. Main reasons included: very short battery life (8-12 hours on continuous play- much shorter if you skip tracks, change volume etc which, hell, everyone does- compared to 30 hours battery for the Sony), plenty of cracked screens, which seems to be a notorious fault, a tendency of crashing or freezing for no apparent reason, expensive replacement batteries that seem to need replacing on average every 1-2 years by a repair agent only. Since I wanted to use it for backpacking I wasn't prepared to risk any problems while on the road and far from a service centre.

I've been on the whole very impressed by the Sony, although they have a lesser name in the market, having only brought out a range this year. It's a metal case- much more durable, the sound quality is excellent, battery life good, has g-shock drop protection, nice features, plays wma, mp3 and ogg files, looks fantastic and is incy wincy cute. Downsides: the software is very difficult to use (I use iTunes and transfer files to Sonic Stage when updating only) and the random play has an annoying tendency to repeat some tracks often and ignore others. Also you can't create a playlist without importing the tracks again for each playlist, which doesn't bother me much as I usually keep it on random. That's about it.

I'd recommend getting as big a capacity as you can afford, though. I didn't think I'd ever fill up 20GB, but it took me a mere four months :o)

I was reluctant to buy things from iTunes because only one computer I use can run it and neither of my mp3 players is an iPod. However, I love the ease of iTunes purchasing. It makes it so simple and economical to legally obtain quality music downloads. So I dug around a bit and found a really easy to use program that strips the restrictive encoding from iTunes files and turns them into clean mp3s. It is glorious, allowing me to play music that I payed for on any of my players and computers, just as I should be allowed.

And you're going to tell the rest of the kids what this fabulous programme is, aren't you?

Actually, there are programs out there that allow you to convert from M4A format to MP3, WAV, and more.

*blushes* Um, wasn't sure you'd want a link to possibly grey-area software in your journal. Also, needed to find the link. It's JHymn (http://hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/), part of the Hymn Project (http://hymn-project.org/).

This (http://www.kennettnet.co.uk/software/podutil.php) is the software I use. :)

Muvo TX FM.

There are two types of MP3 player. The sort where you put, like, all the music you've ever had on it, or the couple mg type where you have, like, 6-10 albums worth of stuff that you swap out easily.

I love mine, because you pop it out, plug it straight into your USB port and drag and drop folders of MP3s as easily as if it were a random drive.

oh my god they have slytherin iPods now?!

*does not need another one does not need another one*

fuuuuuuuck.

It's not like I'm hosting said software; I'm just giving people a forum for discussion.

To add to your pile-o-comments, I'm happy with my 30-gig Creative Nomad Zen Jukebox Xtra (I think I remembered all the words in that). It was $200 on Amazon last February, I think they have the 40-gig version for something similar now, and I'm cheap and don't care about clunkiness (clunkiness in size and lack of spiffy features; it's easy enough to use).

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