thoughts about the iPod

[lauralh]

(or, why I only have a 1G mp3 player)

Let's estimate, if you are anal about quality, that you have 100MB per full album that you encode. So that's about 10 albums per gigabyte of hard disk space. The smallest iPods are now at 30G but started at 10. So that's between 100-300 albums at the low end. Average album is about 60 minutes, so let's say you can listen to your iPod all 16 hours of your waking day. You can't, of course, since you need to talk to people and shit, but let's just assume you can. Two hundred albums would take you close to two weeks to listen to. Let's try the more reasonable assumption that you only want to listen 8 hours a day, and we get the more reasonable 25 days, almost 4 weeks. Well, you get the idea.

Now for some people this is great and totally awesome, but I personally only listen to mp3s on my player typically on the way to and from work, no more than 2 hours a day. I figure this is when most people use theirs, or while walking/at the gym. So that's more like two albums a day. Or three months to get through your collection. But who wants to do that? If I like an album, I want to hear it at least once a week, right? Until I get tired of it and want to take it off my rotation. And I certainly know people who just listen to the same album or playlist over and over and over and over and over. Having more than 4G for these circumstances just seems like a hassle.

Comments

[skiplogic.livejournal.com]

managing a selection is the hassle, I just like having my entire music collection with me at all times. Of course this means either

A. Continually buying new ipods when my collection grows

or

B. purging unlistened songs from my collection from time to time

option b is just as annoying as managing a selection to carry, and a is just not financially attractive.

it's a dilemma.

[skipbreakfast.livejournal.com]

Do you not make playlists?

[skiplogic.livejournal.com]

not really, I usually browse by artist and album, and then if I want to listen to a mix set I just randomize the whole thing.

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

B is fairly easy with iTunes.

[skiplogic.livejournal.com]

that's true, but itunes only keeps track of my listening habits on my computer, not both at the same time?

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

I thought the iPod kept track of what you listened to as well.

[skiplogic.livejournal.com]

it does, but it doesn't merge the statistics back into your itunes library. at least mine doesn't.

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

you mean, when you hook it up and browse the iPod under itunes, it doesn't show what songs you've listened to?

[skiplogic.livejournal.com]

it only shows what i've listened to on the ipod, which may or may not be an accurate indication of whether or not i've listened to it lately and would like to hear it more.

[girlstyle.livejournal.com]

alternatively with iTunes, you can remove stuff from your iTunes library (and thusly from your iPod) without taking them off of your computer. That's how I'm solving this problem currently.