I've been on a bit of a music kick for a while now. A new guitar and amp (thanks darling) mean I'm basting in creative juices. The side effect of this is that I'm listening to a lot of music now - often listening to an album before going to sleep rather than reading for a while.
And the result of this has left me in a pickle, albeit a small one. Or two small ones even.
The first is pretty simple. I've decided I want to rip my entire CD collection to hard disk. That's not a major problem. We have a fast desktop PC with plenty of room to spare. The major issue here is putting in the effort to do it. My solution is likely to be taking a small pile of CDs to the study every time I work in there and rip while I work.
The more pressing issue is that I've no room on my mp3 players for all the music I'd want to carry around. This isn't a problem I've come up against before, I've always said that no-one needs to take more than 4GB of music with them because you just don't have that many favourites.
I'm ready to admit this is wrong now. If I just put my Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden and half of my Pink Floyd CDs onto my wonderful iRiver Clix 2 4GB it is full. No problem thought I, I'll use my very clever Nokia N95 8GB phone instead.
But having left music syncing over to the N95 last night - thanks to its glacial file transfer speed - I have hit the buffers there too. Now the phone is full and I still haven't got all the tracks onto it that I wanted to.
There's an obvious answer. I need a new mp3 player. I'm not sure I want one though. I love the iRiver Clix 2, it's as perfect a piece of technology as you'll ever find. But even if I replaced my 4GB model with the 8GB one I've really not solved the problem.
And looking around at rival players it's all gone multimedia crazy. All the players are advertised as being great for video and web applications. And their price matches that. Of course iPod is an obvious direction but they are just overpriced tat for style concious tosspots, the sound quality is really not on a par with an iRiver.
I do use my Clix 2 for ebooks as well as music but I've recently installed an application on my phone which is a much better ebook reader. So what I want in an mp3 player is just an mp3 player, but one with a large capacity. Something small too, rather than a massive hard-disk based behemoth.
What would be my ideal? A 16 or 32GB iRiver Clix 2 with a slot for memory expansion. Alas such a device doesn't exist. But it seems that Creative do make something similar. The Creative Zen 16GB (and 32GB models) share many features with the Clix 2, including the small size, but have an SD expansion slot so I can increase the storage should I fill up the internal memory.
In fact what I could do is just buy one of the low capacity Zens, say the 4GB model for £50 and then add a £30 16GB SDHC card. That's cheaper than buying a higher capacity player.
So two questions remain. Is the Zen any good? I'll have to check out some reviews. And perhaps the most important question, what am I going to sell to pay for it? I don't suppose any of you want to buy a Canon 28-135mm f4-5.6 IS lens do you?
Update: Of course I should have realised that if my CD collection is only 25GB there's no point looking for a 60GB player. So I reckon I should actually rip my music before I start selling my belongings to get a new player.
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1) I'm sure you're right about the sound quality of an ipod versus iRiver, I learnt a long time ago that I don't have the ears for fine distinctions in quality. However one thing that's great about having an ipod is iTunes. I have my entire CD collection ripped and it comes to ~25Gb. My ipod is an old-style 4Gb nano so I don't have space for all of that. What I do instead is use smart playlists in iTunes. I have one based on ratings, one that's stuff not listened to recently (or at all), recently added, a wild-card one for specific songs/albums I'm in the mood for and then an overall "container" playlist that takes random selection from any of those and caps it at 3Gb - leaving space for podcasts and use for data.
It's a shame Apple won't open up iTunes (the app and the store) to non-Apple players. Anyway could you do something like that with whatever syncing software your iRiver uses?
OTOH - never pass up a decent excuse to buy new gadgets!
2) When I first ripped some CDs (back in 98) it was such a painful process that I only did my favourite tracks off my favourite albums. Much later I went back and decided to do what you're doing. Made a big pile and over the course of a few days an hour or so at a time, reduced the pile slowly. In the process I knackered my laptop's DVD drive. It still sometimes works but it's a bit iffy, especially for writing. So if you do do this, I'd recommend cleaning the drive at regular intervals.