music listening-brick

So I got an iPod. On sale, refurbished. But I went whole hog. 60Gb. It's biiiiiiiiig.

Having done this a bit, I've found some irritations.

- It has more space than my computer's hard drive.

- You can't rip songs directly to the iPod if you want to play them on the iPod,

- If you can listen to it on the iPod, you can't do *anything* to manipulate the file on iTunes, except create and edit playlists within the iPod. I assume this is because of copy protection. You can play songs via your computer, as long as the iPod is connected.

- However, you can use the iPod as a hard drive, to move data files around. This basically negates any piracy prevention mentioned above. I guess a hard drive is different from a media player, even if they actually are the same device.

- If you get a giant iPod, you will have a hard time filling it up. Even if you are able to fill it up what with owning a couple of thousand CDs, it will take you a long time to do it.

- Ripping your music, methodically or spastically, is kind of fun.

It seemed at first like I'd have to rip files to my computer, then copy them to both the iPod and an external hard drive, then delete the files from my computer. Crappily complicated. But there's a way to set any folder as the location for the iTunes library, so my big ass hard drive is now getting the rips directly. It's still complicated and crappy, but not as crappily complicated.

I wonder if I'll run out of room. I keep tweaking with the file format based on random, drifting standards of how important something is, how high the recording's orginal fidelity was, how much I like it. Sometimes I forget, so now I'm ripping the first Beat Happening album (which may have been recorded on a boombox or something) on a kind of high file format. That said, I'm going to do the same for all the Mountain Goats albums, because they have integrity, dammit.

I have a hard time not treating things as precious. This thing is aesthetically designed and over $250, so it gets at the weird "don't touch that!" feeling.

So, hey, I've got a PDA, a cell phone, and an iPod. I work from home. 21st Century man.