Music technology

[cjsmith]

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?]

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thanks! How do you do backups - keep a copy of the filesystem on your computer?

iTunes sounded WONDERFUL until, last night, rfrench and I discovered it isn't nearly as complete as I would like. I wonder if there's a site out there for the weirdos who don't like only the stuff everyone else likes! :)

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.)

[renaissancedan.livejournal.com]

I actually don't know tons about the iTunes music purchase stuff, too bad it didn't have the songs you were interested in, I know it didn't have some of the songs I was looking for too. The only way I know of to get the songs us wierdos listen to is still via the illegal methods, KaZaA and the like... millions of songs still floating around for free.

As for backups, yeah, you'd keep a copy on your desktop machine and another copy in your MP3/iPod player.

[pixiecrinkle.livejournal.com]

I bought an ipod a few months ago and I love it (and yes I'm a PC user). I share your pain on the problem of iTunes not having what you want, because they rarely have anything I listen to either. I've only gotten songs from them when Pepsi was running the free song promotion. Other than that, the songs on my ipod are all from my CDs, but I do use iTunes to manage them (you really don't have much choice on software to manage with an iPod.) iTunes does handle the backup on your machine and the transfer to the iPod itself.

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.