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

[firecat]

I digitized all my vinyl into iTunes on the Mac using a shareware program and a gadget that connects my stereo to the Mac. The program and gadget together cost about $140. It would have cost me a LOT more to replace all the vinyl with CDs or even to replace all the songs I liked on the vinyl with songs from iTunes (assuming they had 'em all, which they didn't, not even close).

Now I am working on my tape collection.

I don't use a portable MP3 player. I use cassettes in my car, but I mostly listen to books on tape from the library, or the radio, not my personal music collection.

The only music purchasing service I've used is iTunes, which is fine for my purposes.