Joining the iPod craze
Well I have done it, I’ve joined that tribe where they all walk around wearing white earbuds. I’m now the proud owner of one of these iPod things. It’s one of the slightly larger ones with the colour screens as I decided I’d rather store my entire music collection on it. No messing around with shuffling my songs around to keep fresh ones on the iPod. It also can store all my photos, which is handy, although the small LCD display will never compare to viewing them in full size on a computer.
I’ve pondered buying an iPod in the past before they had really even become as popular as they are now. The cost was an obstacle though thanks to my recent 21st birthday that was kinda resolved. My more recent conern was the fact that you can’t play OGG Vorbis files with an iPod. Though it was the fact that I have a relatively long commute to Brunswick that was the last straw and made portable music a rather urgent matter.
Of course, there are some alternatives to the iPod that can play OGG but nothing that compares (not to mention that they are mostly Windows CE based). So I’ve frantically been re-encoding my entire CD collection into AAC. I can hear open source purists cringing already. However, AAC is slightly better quality than OGG and it is an open standard, although the patients don’t do justice to open source. None the less, I still have a copy of the OGG files floating around, not to mention the original cds. Ultimately I should probably encode my collection to a lossless format someday.
The one other downside is that they no longer ship with firewire cables. This is annoying since my iBook actually has a firewire port. So any PC iPod owners out there without a need for the firewire cable? 
Otherwise, I’m off to the Apple Edu Store to buy one.
September 5th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
You don’t need OGG Vorbis, AAC and Apple Lossless are good enough.
You don’t need Firewire cable either.
September 5th, 2005 at 10:32 pm
Too late, I now have a Firewire cable, but you do need one because it’s so much faster than USB and doesn’t have funny side effects (e.g. USB devices lose power when your mac is sleeping and plugging in and unplugging USB devices wakes the computer).
September 17th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
Congratulations on the iPod purchase, glad to see you are liking it, I got my self a 3G 20GB iPod about 8 months ago and am really liking it but want to sell it for a iPod nano, One problem with the earlier iPods is they cant charge from usb so I need the firewire cable to charge it and I cant power the iPod when its plugged into my pc as I don’t have any firewire ports, other than that the iPod is a great media player, my music library is a mess at the moment in mp3 from 128kb to 192 VBR and aac 192kbs. I want to have a look at what codec provies best compression and quality and re-encode everything into it.