Ok Fine, But Keep Those Stupid White Headphones Away From Me

(Note: This post originally appeared on my blogspot blog here. Datestamped footnotes with commentary may have been added for my own reflection and amusement.)

I feel dirty. Not necessarily the ironically dirty feeling I respond with whenever the internet asks me what my mood is, but the kind of feeling you get when you finally give in to a phenomenon you somewhat despise.^[1]

I bought an iPod.

Yes, I now own a pair of the iconic white headphones, and they quickly found a place in my trash can. One vestige of my technology snobbery I won’t be letting go along with my taste in mp3 players is my taste in better headphones. However, I do have to admit that I am begrudgingly beginning to accept and own up to the fact that this device is just about perfect for what I intend to use it for.

For a few years I’ve owned an iRiver H320 ‘multi codec jukebox’^[2] and it has been adequate for my mp3 player needs, in that I haven’t really needed one. It stored 20 gigabytes worth of music, had a color screen, and half-passable navigation. However, the battery on it has recently become less than reliable, and I realized recently that it is literally 3 times thicker than a new hard drive based iPod.

Also, I recently purchased a new car. It didn’t come loaded to the brim with options, but it did come with a decent stereo, and I didn’t pay more for the super fancy stereo because the base one comes with an auxiliary input jack right there on the front. Hooray! Welcome to choose my own musical entertainment device shopping.^[3]

As I did the research and various web buzz started swirling around, I realized two key points-

1. pretty much everybody besides apple has given up on producing a high capacity hard drive based music player
2. probably because there really aren’t too many people who require more than a few gigabytes of storage space for their music.

Not me- if I’m driving more than 10 minutes, I want to have every album I own on hand to pick from. This mp3 player will be automobile based only, and not really used for video watching outside of a random few occurrences. Therefore, the new iPod Classic was pretty much the only choice, and with 80 gigs of storage for 250 bucks, I decided to give it a shot.

For my purposes using it in the car is great, scrolling is fast and easy- worlds better than the 4 directional navigation on my iRiver, and the audible clicking you get when using the scroll wheel is helpful, sound quality is more than good enough just out of the headphone jack into the aux input, so long as you don’t crank the volume all the way up. Once I get to cleaning up all my tags on my music files, it should be a snap to pick whatever album suits my fancy.

I may not like you Steve Jobs, but damn it I respect your product.

4.5 out of 5 fountain cokes