Mini

I know I shouldn't go off about my iPod mini, but I have to. Rose said that Jeff Simpson will sometimes go off about his iPod, devoting whole blog entries to it, and it annoys people. Well, if you are one of those people, stop reading.

I LOVE my iPod mini. Truly. Wholly. I do. It's only been 4 days, but compared to any other music device that I've had, the iPod reigns supreme. I was a bit annoyed at first, the "easy-of-use" factor wasn't that good. I think of myself as fairly tech-savy, but figuring out how I wanted to organize things, and then making that happen, was two fairly different things. I did, after a bit, finally figure it out. I managed to find about 1050 songs that I wanted to put on my iPod that first day. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find ~1000 songs that you actually wouldn't mind listening to. I guess it's around 80 albums on there. 80 albums turned out to be ~5 gigs, an unsatisfying number, so the search began for a good piece of software that could quickly and easily batch convert my MP3 files into 112Kbps AAC files. With little luck, I thought I was doomed to only have 1200 songs on my iPod. I knew that iTunes would convert MP3 -> AAC (or MP4 / M4A), but when I tried it on an album it was painfully slow. So the search continued.

I managed to eventually find a program called Switch (I can't find the URL again, sorry.... Found it) and quickly converted my MP3 files and synced them to my iPod. Little did I know, but Switch doesn't do ID3 tag conversions, so none of the playlists I had created worked anymore. All my songs were listed in one giant list :( Back to the drawing board. As you can probably guess, I eventually gave up on the conversion software and just used iTunes to convert my songs (on Karen's laptop which nicely took 9 hours). So I have ~1000 songs on my mini, and I'm happy for all of Wednesday at work. Well, that night I decide that the laptop isn't going to cut it, so I install iTunes on my PC, plug in the iPod, and the stupid software syncs my empty library. All my songs, gone, deleted, sent far beyond to the deep void of the nether-bits'n'bytes. Sad, mad, angry, pissed off, all of them...

After searching through my music collection again, I managed to find ~1400 songs again, set them all to convert while I was asleep Wednesday night, and synced again when I woke up. ~1400 songs, apparantly takes up about 3.6GB of space when converted to AAC. SWEET! At that rate I'll fit about 2200 songs on my iPod mini and never have to change the music (except when I find a new album that's worthy).

But wait, there's more. After reading Jer's blog bit on CBC 3's podcast I decided to check it out. What was a podcast, was it interesting? Was there anything out there that I was going to find interesting? So I open up iTunes, click on Podcasts, and find a wonderful assortment of free recordings from various people / radio stations that look like I might enjoy them. Well, needless to say, but I will anyway, the remaining space on the mini is now gone. I suppose it's okay to live with 1400 songs, but now I'm wishing I had the extra 200 dollars or so and was able to get the 20GB iPod ;)

Podcasts: Interesting most of the time, boring and not worth the bandwidth others. Here are a few I found that were interesting.

• The Dawn and Drew Show; a show by a wife and husband team from middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin. Absolutely hilarious at times, at others, not so good. I can see why it's rated number one on Podcast Alley all the time.


• Keith and the Girl; Two extremely opinionated people, always funny, sometimes obnoxiously so, but worth the listen (extreme Adult content).


• Soccergirl, incorporated; I only started listening to this this morning, but it seems fairly funny (extreme Adult content).


• this WEEK in TECH; I've never liked Leo Laporte. Ever since I first saw him a few years ago on TechTV, he's just always seemed like such a media-whore. The problem, though, is that he knows his stuff and he's very good at getting the information across. I'll listen to every new show, yet feel bad about it afterward ;) (website seems to be down at the moment, but that's the URL.)

I listened to CBC 3's podcast, but I just couldn't get into it because of the techno and the hip-hop mixed in with the good music, sorry Jer. Anyway, I found a program this morning called Anapod Explorer that I'm going to try out. Fully integrating iPod into Explorer and totally bypassing iTunes seems like a darn good idea to me. I'll talk more about it when I've tested it fully. It might just be one of those programs that I actually use a lot, and if that's the case I'll actually buy it.