Once, When 20GB Was All You Needed
I bought myself an iRiver MP3 player, the 20GB iHP-120. After I read that Apple's mini iPod isn't really that mini, I went back to the drawing board. The new iPods (the colored ones) are a marketing ploy to suck up that portion of the marketplace which is on the fence about buying an iPod. They're not that much smaller (about 3/4 of the size), much smaller hard drive capacity, and only 50 bucks cheaper. Can you say status symbol? I like Apple and how they make their products, but I just have a hard time justifying the up-scale price points they insist on.
eP editor man Craig Young pointed me towards iRiver and their series of hard drive MP3 players. What sold me finally on the iHP-120 is the Line In jack. Not only is it a fully functional USB-style external plug and play hard drive, it can record. Like all that vinyl I've got sitting on the shelf that I never listen to.
I've rediscovered a 12" from 1998: "The Spy Who Dubbed Me (Parts 1-4)" by OST. It was released on Related and my copy is labeled as a promo, and OST are the initials of Oliver Stanley Templeton. I have no idea what else this guy has done, but this record is a four-part symphony to spy films, slathered with fat basslines, bright horn stabs, thick reverb and shaken down by a solid dose of '70s sex funk. It is glorious and will probably become the piece of music I listen to every day on the way home to dust off the grit from work and ease me into, well, the rest of my life. I just wish I could find more info on the guy who put this record together. Last time I did the Internet crawl for him (which, admittedly, was years ago when I first got this record), I came up with zero. I think the label was even out of business already.
Hmmm. Must crawl the web again.
But, yeah, love my MP3 player. I wish the buttons on the remote weren't quite so mickey mouse and that it supported smart playlists like iTunes and the iPod do, but these are small quibbles. I'm not quite sure why I scoffed for so long about these. Probably because my last experience with an MP3 player was back in the day when 64MB was the upper limit to their capacities, and having a player that couldn't really carry more than a CD's worth of material didn't make a whole lot of sense. You run into the same basic problem that a mini-disc player has: highly portable, but you've got to carry a dozen cartridges to have a decent selection of music with you. Not the case with 20GB of storage in the iHP-120.
Which is silly. Who needed 20GB for anything before mp3s? When I upgraded my desktop computer at home last year, I splurged and got a 120GB hard drive, thinking that I'd never fill it. But I am discovering that the pack rat urge extends to electronic data storage as well.