Muzak Non Stop, originally uploaded by Annelogue.

I’ve gone from not have any digital music player to having two! One thing is that I’ve had trouble deciding what the best solution for me would be. Another thing is money. This stuff costs a lot in Scandinavia, but was fairly cheaper in Japan, hence the splurge. I’ve spent Easter ripping all my Cd’s and putting a lifetime of music into the iPod and they don’t even fill up half of the 60G disk. So now, I’m putting my Cd’s in the basement. No more Cd’s without covers or covers without Cd’s! I’ll never need them again, unless both my iPod and back-up storage gets stolen at once, off course. The Creative Zen has a neat little radio and 1G memory, so I can put quite a bit of stuff on that, too.

I’m not too happy about iTunes on Windows, though. Mainly because it’s been crashing on me quite few times. I’m not impressed about the usability of iTunes either. The software that comes with Creative Zen Player is actually much easier and better to use. Hopefully iTunes will get better in time.

Having a digital music player has really opened up a whole new world to me! I’ve in love with the iTunes music store and I’m digging the audio books you can get there! It’s so easy to buy music! I’ve already spent too much money this month, so I don’t understand why the music industry’s is moaning about lost income. They should embrace the new technology and the new possibilities that comes with it! I’m spending MORE money now on music than ever before, because of the ease of access to it.

I’ve tried a couple of online music stores besides iTunes and I have to figure out the best strategy to buy music so that I can ,without too much hassle, put same music on both my music players. CD’s are safe and the easiest to put on both players, but it would be better if I could just download music and it would be just as easy to transfer to both players.

I’ve tested downloading music from one store which used *.wma protected music files. I was given a licence to play the music on my own machine and there some were other restrictions, too. It worked fine to transfer them to my MP3 player, but iTunes would not accept the protected files. Hmf. Luckily, I only bought two songs for test purposes. I don’t think I’ll buy more from that music store. Then I tested the iTunes Store, where there were no problems in transferring songs to the iPod, of course, but I had less luck with transferring the songs directly to the MP3 player. So that means that I have to convert the MP4 files to Mp3 in a separate process. I just have to figure out how to do that. So far, the the easiest thing has been to just rip the good old Cd’s onto both players. Damn, I wish it were as easy with the download-able purchases, but it isn’t…yet.