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Music technology
OK, I'm tired of lugging around twenty-year-old cassettes simply because I like one or two of the songs on each of the albums. I don't even listen to cassettes (partially because my car stereo eats them), but I can't bear to throw them all out.
Obviously it would be very expensive to replace every one of them with the analogous CD. I'm a cheapskate. Plus it's a low-density solution: on each CD I would still like just one or two songs. There has to be a better way.
So... what about those MP3 players, for which songs can be purchased one at a time? Question for the LJ brain trust. What do you use? What are the foibles and strengths of the player(s) you've chosen? What's your experience with the various ways to purchase music for them? Does anybody out there have a really wide selection of MP3s for sale, or am I faced with the (quite possibly illegal) prospect of taking a tape like Bobby McFerrin's "The Voice" and hand-recording it? What's your backup technology for your chosen system?
[Edits:
1. The stuff I want (for example, Bobby McFerrin's "The Voice") is not available from iTunes. Is there a bigger site, or at least a weirder site?
2. My car does not have a functional cassette input.
3. Anybody out there doing backups?]
Obviously it would be very expensive to replace every one of them with the analogous CD. I'm a cheapskate. Plus it's a low-density solution: on each CD I would still like just one or two songs. There has to be a better way.
So... what about those MP3 players, for which songs can be purchased one at a time? Question for the LJ brain trust. What do you use? What are the foibles and strengths of the player(s) you've chosen? What's your experience with the various ways to purchase music for them? Does anybody out there have a really wide selection of MP3s for sale, or am I faced with the (quite possibly illegal) prospect of taking a tape like Bobby McFerrin's "The Voice" and hand-recording it? What's your backup technology for your chosen system?
[Edits:
1. The stuff I want (for example, Bobby McFerrin's "The Voice") is not available from iTunes. Is there a bigger site, or at least a weirder site?
2. My car does not have a functional cassette input.
3. Anybody out there doing backups?]
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My gut feel says it should be legal, as I've paid for the music itself and am quite willing to toss the cassette once I've made the conversion. However, some tickle deep in my memory says that at least at one time, such conversion was in fact illegal, even for one's own use. Sounds like I'm out of date on that.
Which player do you use? Can you use it with your car stereo somehow, and if so how? Do you also purchase individual songs sometimes? How easy have you found it to be to rip MP3s from cassette?
Sorry for the third degree... I'm trying to take advantage of being a late adopter by asking all my friends what they've learned. :-)
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We have a Rio Volt SP100 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005A1KZ/002-5911755-3413610?v=glance), which is no longer in production. We use a cassette car adapter if we want it in the car. We bought it a few years ago when we were driving cross-country.
I've never bought MP3s online. I've only ever used my own library. We haven't done any ripping from cassette, but you should be able to do it if your tape player has a line out, and your soundcard has a line in hookup. You'll need software to actually do the ripping. I'm not sure what would be best that way. I use Music Match to rip from CD and to burn them to CD.
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There are tons of options for MP3 players, but I would kind of lean towards the Apple iPods (doesn't matter if you're Mac or PC, they're great either way and synch perfectly with both) One reason I like them is there are so many out there, if you ever needed help there should be lots of people to offer assistance, etc.
For purchasing, legally, you might just download a copy of iTunes, again, it works perfectly on Mac or PC and will synch with your iPod. You can buy tons of songs for just $1 each and I think they've got discounted prices for complete albums as well.
Hope that helps!
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iTunes sounded WONDERFUL until, last night,
There's no subscriber fee to the iTunes thingy, right? Just the per-song (or per-album) charge? (That would make it a lot better than eMusic.)
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As for backups, yeah, you'd keep a copy on your desktop machine and another copy in your MP3/iPod player.
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If you're interested in the ipod, they just released the fourth generation, and the prices are way down on those, plus, all the leftover 3G ones are over on overstock.com for pretty cheap too.
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Everyone--from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil-liberties advocacy group--seems to agree on one point:
"It's perfectly legal for you to make copies of your own music for your own personal use," says Robin Gross, EFF's staff intellectual-property attorney. "It's called 'fair use.' It's your legal right to do so, even if the copyright holder doesn't want you to."
An alternative to the MP3 player -> car audio system hookup is an MP3-CD player - you can put quite a lot more songs on each CD in MP3 format. Can't recommend it since I haven't used one myself, but at least it would bypass the need to plug the portable player into the cassette adapter and fiddle with its separate controls.
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