Well, it's been a whopping four days and I already returned my iPod mini for a regular 40GB iPod. I had been furiously burning CD since Sunday trying to fill up the iPod mini and I finally did it this morning. Then a collegue was telling me about Penn State's Napster deal. I sort of knew about this in the back of mind but never gave it much thought 'till today. Penn State has a contract with Napster, so any current student gets a free subscription. And Napster lets you download as much music as you want--but of course it's all DRM protected, so you can only listen to on whatever drive you downloaded it to. And of course, I want nothing more than to get all that great music onto my iPod. Solution: tunebite rerecords DRM protected WMA files into unprotected mp3's. Since you have to essentially playback every file you want to convert, it's slow--but the sound quality is maintained, at least to my ears. Problem solved--now I can download unlimited music and transfer every last bit of it to my iPod. SO that was the great impetus for upgrading to the larger iPod. This also lead to me cancelling my Musicmatch subscription.

I so wanted to get the iPod photo with the color screen, but I couldn't justify another $100 for the color screen and the ability to look at pictures--that's what flickr's for.

I should also say, that I've started using iTunes again, and it might not be as bad as I originally stated. I just had to give myself time to figure it out and get it to work with my current library. So far so good. My apologies to iTunes.

Posted by Hey Paul   |   Thursday, December 02, 2004