Send in the Clones....

OK, it's been an incredibly long time since I last posted a blog. Since the last blog, I still have not seen the movie "300", I've started school, and got an ipod. That's right, I'm now a part of the ipod clone army. I tried to resist, I tried to hold out, I tried to be the last vestiges of hope for humanity. But alas, it was not meant to be. Resistance, as they say, is futile.

Honestly though, it wasn't for lack of trying. It would seem that every company that makes an mp3 player was dead set against me buying their product. What's that you say? How can a company be against me buying their product? Simple. Make sure their product is incompatible with my computer system. You see, I'm still running Windows 2k Pro. It's been stable, I haven't had any trouble with it, and Windows XP just wasn't impressive enough for me to upgrade. I need more from my OS than a pretty face. XP was like that really pretty girl who gets disfigured in a car accident. Oh sure, she was a hottie and you'd give your left nut to be with her, but when her looks were taken away by that horrible accident, there really wasn't much there to begin with. That coupled with the horror stories of legal copies locking up, and I just wasn't going to upgrade.

Now we have Vista, and yes, I'll be upgrading since support for Win2K is going to be going out the window here soon. I'm just waiting for the first service pack to fix alot of the release bugs. So, I need to find an mp3 player that is compatible with my system. Every mp3 player I looked at was incompatible with Win2K (aside from the ipod, which is), even the Zune, Microsoft's stupid entry into the mp3 player market. Oh, it looks cool, seems to do a lot of cool stuff the ipod does and even some it can't, until you read the fine print. They lock the music down tight. This is supposedly to help prevent pirating. The funny thing about the efforts to stop piracy, is that it seems to be doing it in a backwards fashion. Apparently, piracy is stopped when you stop good, law-abiding citizens from being able to do anything with their music other than look at it sitting on a table. Except they pretty much miss the point, in that criminals really aren't going to care about the laws and will still find a way to pirate music and movies. Meanwhile, as the pirating continues unabated, those who follow the rules pretty much are the only ones suffering.

Case in point: Awhile back, I bought the Velvet Revolver CD. The thing cost me nearly $25. First off, someone tell me why we're paying upwards of $20-25 for a CD that costs only a fraction to make? Back in the 1990s, it cost roughly $4 to make each CD. That same $4 paid for the royalties to the band, the CD artist, the disc and the jewelcase, among other stuff. So consider that a CD made at those prices is being sold at a 4-500% markup, and the artists see none of that money. And the record companies are complaining that the artists are getting ripped off and harmed by music pirating? Given that today's technology makes creating a CD even cheaper, that price increase gets bigger. I'm not saying it's cool to pirate music (well, ok, some music is ok to pirate, say for instance, Avril Lavign or Justin Timberlake, some music just isn't worth the price), but if the record companies are that worried about their artists getting ripped off, maybe they should start taking a look at themselves. But I digress.

Velvet Revolver CD. Never been able to listen to it on my computer. When I try, it comes out garbled, the interface that launches when I insert it loads but doesn't work, giving me a message to go to some site, for which there's nothing there to help me with my problem, and it puts something on my computer, that I'm not aware it's doing. Pardon me, but isn't that a lot like spyware? No matter what I've done, it never plays on my computer. What the fuck? Oh, it seems there's something on the CD to help prevent piracy. So I, Good Citizen, honestly purchase said CD, but I'm automatically limited as to what I could do with it? That's bullshit. Oh, and can I point out that while I was unable to use my LEGAL copy on my computer (where I listen to the vast majority of my music), I was able to illegally download every track off that album. I was forced to resort to illegally downloading it, even though I paid for a copy. Makes me wonder why I spent $25 in the first place.

So, I'm uploading music to the ipod, and I try uploading this CD. The songs are garbled. I can't even upload my legal copy to my own ipod. I found the way around it, and it now resides on my ipod, without the funky garbling. I won't say how, other than, don't let it autoplay. Probably works for other CDs that do the same. This, then, was the only problem I encounterd with the ipod.

Which leads me to a short review about the ipod: I now cannot live without it. I take it everywhere, unless I'm with my kids. I'm still uploading CDs to it (everyone of them legal, I might add), though I'm almost at the end, and I'm not even going to bother uploading my entire CD collection to it. I'm not sure how to tell how many albums are on there, but at last count (over a week ago), there was something like 30 albums on it. I have the black 30 GB model, only 7 GB is taken up by my music. I love that I put in on shuffle and then leave it alone. With nearly 2.1k songs, I've yet to hear a repeat. I can't even begin to fathom taking along that many CDs everywhere I go. There's something warm and fuzzy about knowing that a good portion of my CD collection is there and waiting, for whenever I feel like listening to it, all in a small, compact form.

The things I hate about the ipod is this: the headphones and the fact that no charger comes with it, for those times when I'm not around my computer. For the price of the damn thing, you'd think Apple would have included at least a plug in charger. No, instead, I'll have to purchase that seperately. I also hate that there are games taking up space on it. Why do you need or want games on your ipod? There is one, called music quiz, or something, that is actually pretty cool, and is quite addicting. When you play it, it plays snippets of songs that you've loaded on your ipod, and then gives you a list. You have a short timer to choose which one it is, and as time counts down, it removes titles. Depending on how fast you choose depends on how many points you get. Not sure if there's a point at which you lose, never got that far, but I did rack up a pretty impressive score.

So, if you want a good mp3 player, get the ipod. Sure, you'll be a clone, but at least your supporting a company that tries to incorporate more than just the latest fashions in technology.