Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Lick It Up (MP3 1)

Okay, time for another late night post. I've been writing a huge research paper off and on all day today, and I just can't write anymore. Time for something more fun.

I've had a sweet little companion keeping me awake while writing this paper tonight. My ultra cool wife got me a new electronic toy as a combination birthday/almost done with horribly annoying school present. She had considered getting me an iPod last year for Christmas, and I mentioned this year that it would be a good combination present, especially since they have free engraving right now.

I was fine with either a mini or the standard model. However, we decided that we really should get one of the color models. Now that the 30 GB photo model has been phased out, that left either the 20 or 60 GB color models. I decided that the $100 premium for the 60 GB just wasn't worth it. If it isn't already, my collection will no doubt expand past 60 GB. If I can't keep the entire thing on there, I doubt that I really need more than 20 GB, so that's what she got.

Here are some pictures. You can see the very cool engraving she added to the back:

So, of course I wasn't satisfied to stop there. I needed to keep it with me at all times, it was just too darn convenient. I don't have XM in the car, so this was a great alternative to crap radio or carting CD's around. Thus, I purchased an iTrip FM modulator. Fantastic design, and works very well. I also disliked how many scratches I was accumulating rather quickly. To stop this from happening, and to spice things up a bit I picked up an iSkin. Here are some photos with the iSkin:



I think it turned out pretty sweet and incredibly useful. Now, I'm working on getting my iTunes library all sorted out. Lots of playing with ID3 tags, some musicbrainz work, and some fun with the iTunes art importer. It's just too cool when all of the song data is right, and I can look at the album art in color on the iPod.

Lastly, if you were wondering why the (MP3 1) was in the title, this is the first of two posts I'm going to do about MP3 devices. I plan to post a review of the VR3, my previous MP3 toy, shortly.

3 comments:

---ryan said...

Looks nice.

I feel your pain on getting that iTunes DB all sorted out. I know I've mentioned it to you before, but I'll put it down for anyone reading. Letting iTunes manage your music database is a good thing. At first I was against this. No stupid program was gonna run my life! Then I made the switch from Windows to OSX without consolidating my library first. Now I get to play the fun game of pointing iTunes to my external firewire drive for all songs that I didn't rip from iTunes. I now let it manage my music for me :)

Jason said...

I do plan on having iTunes manage my libarary. 2 things I have to resolve first.

1. Right now I just plain don't have enough disk space to import them into the library, without doing it a few at a time and deleting the old copy. Too many damn movies on the drive.

2. I want things named correctly before I move them, so I don't have to fix them up after.

Ian, ID3-TagIT has worked fantastic for me. I used it to cleanup all of my tags, and then rename my files accordingly. It can go in reverse as well.

crturboguy said...

OMG.. that ID3-TagIt program is da bomb. It helped me chew through all my mp3's and get them cleaned up nicely. Now iTunes is all happy w/ appropriately titled/id'd tracks.

--JOsh