Sprkus

Over six years after the first iPod was released in October of 2001, I finally got my hands on one yesterday.

As an early birthday/Christmas present to myself, I bought the 80 GB black iPod Classic at Target yesterday. They offered a free $25 dollar gift card with purchase of the $250 device, which was one of the better deals I could find.

With the thousands of songs I’ve collected over the years, I thought I’d probably need the 160 GB version but after checking the file size of the music folder on my computer, I saw that it read only just over 14 GB. It’s amazing how many MP3 files 1 GB of storage can hold.

The large capacity enables iPod Classic users to also store movies, but I knew I wouldn’t be watching many movies on the small iPod screen. If my job required me to travel a lot by myself in planes, than I could see using it. But as it stands right now, by the time I fill the 80 GB hard drive with MP3s, the iPod will probably be an antique.

Though this is my first iPod, I’ve been downloading MP3s for years. Like everyone else, I used to download music for free via Napster and then Kazaa when Napster was shut down. Eventually I was overly annoyed with the hit and miss quality of the ripped music, not to mention the number of intentionally broken files probably uploaded by record industry employees.

The dummy MP3 files would play for about 30 seconds and then simply emit a high-pitched screeching sound for the remaining three minutes of the songs. I tried iTunes for $0.99 a song and never went back. The convenience of downloading the 10 to 20 new songs I wanted to own a month was more than worth it.

Now that I own an iPod, I’m even more happy I paid for the last 3-4 years of music downloads because they came packed with the full album and song information, which I would never have taken the time to enter myself. The MP3s also came with cover art which looks really sweet when it’s playing on the iPod.

I spent a little time better organizing my iTunes library and then synced all my music over to the iPod. While playing with the new toy a little while, I noticed the movie “Hotel Chavelier,” a short film staring Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman, had been transfered over as well. It was offered as a free download on iTunes a couple months back. So I watched the movie, or at least its best scene, and was impressed with the image quality. The screen’s small, but it reproduces pretty well. Well enough to watch, again, as a passenger on a plane or long car ride.

So I downloaded a few of this year’s better music videos including OK Go’s “Here it Goes Again” and Feist’s “1234,” as well as a couple from Tom Petty for good measure. I also synced some personal photos from vacations over to the iPod for the heck of it, even though they’re published on this Web site.

Next might be converting Baumann and Van Culin’s People’s Court video and Gerrit’s Boxer Incident.

The biggest news is the iPod signals the end of a long line of rock mix CDs, no. 30 being the last.

My semi-new Civy has an auxiliary input to which I can connect the iPod in order to pump the audio straight through the car’s speakers. I am now completely CD free and will have my entire music collection with me wherever I go. It’s going to be perfect for the Las Vegas trip, which starts Sunday, Dec. 16 and ends Dec. 19, the day after my 30th birthday celebration. We’re flying, but it’ll be nice to be able to hook it up to a couple small computer speakers in the hotel room. At least until I get a docking station. Lets just hope I don’t lose the iPod on the Las Vegas strip.

If you’re interested in viewing the songs I listen to, check out my Last FM profile. All the songs I play via iTunes and now the iPod are recorded and uploaded. Maybe you’ll find something new you like.