thoughts about the iPod
Apr. 19th, 2006 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
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Date: 2006-04-20 06:32 pm (UTC)I also make 14 hour drives down to Southern California, fairly regularly.
And I think that flash memory mp3 players are definitely a better technology than hard drive based players, like those iPods.
Put it all together, and this summer I'm going to be getting my first mp3 player, that I've been waiting years for -- a 2GB flash, solid state version. It should have enough battery life to last me an entire one way trip, with a different song the whole way. Then I'm going to have to mod my car stereo to make everything convenient -- with an appropriate power jack, maybe, and an input jack (which it doesn't have).