![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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?]
no subject
iTunes can play AAC files (naturally), so if your laptop has iTunes you'd have no trouble playing the songs on it. With the iTunes store songs, though, I know you have to do something a little funky with the copyright protection... I think you're allowed to "authorize" the song on a few different computers, though, so it should work. And of course anything that you ripped personally would be freely transferable anywhere you wanted, and you can choose to rip to mp3, AAC, whatever format you like best. I've ripped a few things to full-quality AIFF files, which are huge but these things were important enough that I wanted the absolute full quality possible.
Hmm. Actually, now that I think of it, what my co-worker does is just plug a line-out from his iPod into his computer at work (it's a cheap and readily available cable). He plays the actual songs on the iPod, but they come out of his computer speakers. That's a hell of a lot simpler than trying to transfer anything, so that's probably what you'd want to do with your laptop if it's not your primary music storage place.
Right now I don't have any backups except the iPod itself, which is probably going to fail before my hard drive does. If the hard drive does go first, there's some third-party software that can pull the music off of the iPod -- Apple discourages it and doesn't officially support it, because otherwise people would just borrow their friends' iPods and have tons of free music. I've considered either backing up onto Ken's computer, since he has more space than he will ever need, or burning a couple of CD backups of particularly hard to recreate stuff. I haven't actually completed my small ripping-from-tapes project, so the only music for which I don't have original CDs is a few dozen songs from the iTunes store. I think the best thing to do with them would be to burn an audio CD, because that will un-compress the files and turn them into ordinary music tracks; then if I ever do need to re-rip them they will be totally non-copyright-protected, and thus I'll never have to worry about potential malfunctions in that area denying me my music! Damn, I should get started on that.
Uhh, hope this wasn't too long-winded...