Digital Music

I have to admit that I am a digital music junkie. The clincher is the hundreds of CD’s in my basement. I really don’t feel the need to own many more hard music copies than I do already. If I knew of a good outlet for my current collection, I would probably be willing to part with it. At least CD’s are smaller and more durable than albums and cassette tapes. I don’t think I would enjoy moving albums.

I bought a personal computer for school in 2004. As it was a Dell, I bought a Dell DJ and ripped all of my CD’s into digital form. Then I started buying songs that I liked and before you know it had amassed dozens of songs from Music Match. Unfortunately Music Match did not always have the selection I wanted, so I bought a couple from Yahoo Music as well.

In 2006 I got an Ipod and while I appreciated the sleek design for a 1GB player relative to the monstrosity 30GB Dell DJ, I was a bit perturbed by Itunes. Music I purchased on Music Match would not import to Itunes. Music I purchased on Itunes would not import to my Dell DJ. Most people would just draw a line in the sand and choose a go forward format, but I kind of just slowed down and stopped purchasing much online music.

I still continued to buy some on Music Match and reserved the Ipod for podcasts and other tidbits from the Itunes store. Then the Yahoo Music merger with Music Match sent me into a tailspin as I had multiple music engines on my PC and still did not have the selection I wanted. What I did was make matters worse by signing up for a Rhapsody account from which I have a great selection, but cannot port the files to the Ipod. I can play Rhapsody tracks on the Dell DJ, but creating play lists from the new Yahoo Music and Rhapsody is tedious. I even bought music from a Wal-Mart site as it was the only place I could find the track I wanted.

So now I am in the tedious inventory phase. I am working through what music I have and what music I want. I am going to make the leap to an mp3 compatible car stereo and want to ensure either compatibility with both or draw a line in the sand and select my format going forward. I would still like to investigate the Creative Zen and Zune options. For now the Archos players are still larger than what I consider portable.