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

[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.