Pod Person

Well, I am now the proud owner of a 60 GB video iPod. Yay! It seems like a pretty good little machine, fairly intuitive to use, I think, once you've figured out how you're supposed to do that weird thing with your thumb. It's missing a few features I liked a lot about my Karma (including the ability to play a random list of music for a pre-specified period of time, which I'm really gonna miss unless I can figure out a way to get the same effect), but it possesses a few nice ones the Karma didn't have (like an automatic pause when the headphones get yanked out, as mine have a tendency to do). It's a bit bulkier than the nicely compact Karma, but I got a very nice carrier for it, with a belt clip, so that should be fine.

There is something I'm very, very pissed off about, though, which is that I have music on my hard drive which I bought a while back on Napster, and iTunes will have absolutely nothing to do with it, because it has copyright encoding. Yes, that's right. I am not allowed to listen to music which I bought and paid for on a device which I bought and paid for, because the frickin' record labels assume that I am a criminal. Well, you know what? I have a pretty good history of paying for music even when I could easily have gotten it illegally for free. Seems to me, though, that it's hardly worth being law-abiding when obeying the law just gets you punished. iTunes sure as hell wouldn't have had any problem with illegally downloaded files, because they don't come with all these insane DRM restrictions, do they? Congratulations, music industry! Between this and the Sony debacle and all the other shit you've pulled lately -- including an insultingly accusatory "Don't Steal Music!" sign on my iPod when I opened it -- you've convinced me that being law-abiding, in this case, is stupid. Also that I don't owe you any respect, because you clearly have none whatsoever for me. (And I'll tell ya, if I'd realized this fact ahead of time, I very possibly wouldn't have bought the iPod at all.)

Ahem. Anyway, now that I'm done with that rant... I still have to transfer all my music off the Karma and onto the iPod. (Fortunately, Rio, at least, didn't assume I was a low-down dirty thief and is quite willing to let me do this. No, wait, this time I'm done with the rant. Really.) In order to help me do this, I have, um... Spent still more money I really couldn't afford. It hasn't arrived yet, but I've also bought myself a 200 GB external hard drive to supplement the tiny, stuffed-to-bursting one on my PC. I figure it'll make a nice repository/backup for the entirety of my music collection (which won't all even fit on the PC, not unless I delete, well, lots and lots of stuff I'm not gonna delete), as well as large video files and so forth. So the plan is, once I have the hard drive, to dump everything from the Karma onto it, convert all the ogg files to mp3 -- I did find what seems to be a decent program for that -- and load it all onto the iPod. It'll be time-consuming, but it shouldn't be too difficult, and then we're in business! Unless, of course, iTunes decides that more of my music collection is stolen. Bastards.