Nucking Futs!

Jack in Consumerland
I bought an iPod classic on which to store audiobooks. My intention is to listen to them while bicycling in the Great White North. I expect/hope to be gone the whole summer so I figured that I would want a lot of them, and correspondingly, would want as large a storage device as possible. So I got the bigger of the 2 iPod Classics, the one with 160 GB. I have been looting first the North Berkeley Public Library, and now the Berkeley Main Library, of their books on CD. I have been just pouring these things into the iPod night and day for several days now.

I have saved 171 discs so far, almost all of them just over an hour long. Each disc contains about 700 MB, so one would think I had used up 171 x 700 MB, roughly 120 GB. On the one hand, because of formatting losses, there are only 146 GB usable on the iPod. On the other, in the process of loading and transferring the files, iTunes apparently compresses them. So I still have 142 GB free.

Which means that the amount of audiobooks I can store on the thing is boggling and way beyond any possible use.

If I can transfer the files back to the computer's iTunes library, I wouldn't have to load them again if I were to get a different device and want them on that instead. Which means I could return the iPod Classic, i.e. Old, and get an iPod New. The newer ones have all sorts of features - a wi-fi browser, applications, maybe a telephone, a camera, a slot machine, a steam iron, whatever. I had dismissed iPod New when I was deciding what to get because it holds no more than 8 GB. Now I realize that 8 GB would hold every audiobook in every library in the Bay Area.

So I may greed out and get a bunch of functions I neither need nor want. Calm yourself, Jack. The pictures of the iPod New are nice, but what is the point?

The one thing one that would really suck up vast amounts of storage, movies on DVD, won't load. So there really is no reason for this thing at all. Or, I guess I could use it as a backup storage device for the pictures I presumably will take during the summer. That is actually a reasonable use to make of it. But at least I will check if any of the bells and whistles on the iPod New call to me. More shoppping online....enough already.