MP3 Gadgetty Goodness

MP3s, as you may have heard, are all the rage among a cerrtain sort of Internet hotdog. And although I'm pretty much exactly the sort of person who'd be expected to get all hot and bothered over them, I've pretty much resisted the MP3 craze.

Yup. That's me. I sit around smirking when my boss tells me he downloaded 3,000 MP3s over the weekend. Because let's face it, even I have a more productive weekend schedule. I'd get MP3s from here and there, but I'd burn them to cd almost immediately, because, well, I like cds more than MP3s.

Well.

It's like this. I'm going to Japan in a week, and I've got this money sitting around. And I went out gadget-shopping, on the theory that I could buy something to enjoy on the flight. I barely had enough self control not to get a hand-held voice stress analyzer/lie detector. I tried very hard to convince myself that I had a use for it, but I don't play poker. And I guess it wouldn't be allowed at the table anyway. I was very close to getting a talking translator, but I'm sure it wouldn't be as cool as the ones they had on Star Trek. And how sad is that, that I refuse to buy anything that's not insufficiently futuristic?

Anyway. Right. The gadget-shopping. I feel a little embarassed about it because of all the time I spent not wallowing in Napster. As you've no doubt figured out (aren't you clever?), I got an MP3 player. Specifically, the Nomad Jukebox, which holds 6GB. That's a Six. And a Gigabytes. It's a great big hard drive with a plastic shell and a headphone jack.

Do you know how much music you can put into six gigabytes? Neither do I. I've been cheerfully dumping entire cds into it since I got home, and it's not anywhere close to being full. It's crazy, is what it is. The unit's about the size of a Discman, which itself was a piece of pretty cool electronics in its day. And right now I've got ten discs of music into the new kid on the block, and I've barely started.

So I guess I like MP3s now. But here's the dumb part. I've run across plenty of MP3s, because even though I don't seek them out (well, not much), cool people send me songs they know I'l like, and I spend enough time clicking randomly on the Internet to find a few good songs. And when I got MP3s, I did what any sensible person would do: I burned them onto cds. And now that I've got a great big godly MP3 player, I'm ripping those burned cds back out to MP3 format.

It's all very circular. And it's requiring me to use words like "burned" and "ripped", which I'm normally against. It seems to me that these are words invented by people anxious to pretend that they're doing something more visceral than compying files from one format to another. And yet, here I am, ripping and burning like nobody's business.

The thing that I've tried to avoid is spending all my time looking for new cool MP3s, because I'm the sort of person that would spend all my time doing that. I'm a completist, and the thought that a supercool track might be five minutes away could easily keep me awake all night. So right now I'm trying not to think about MP3s as individual files that I could download easily. So very easily.

Sorry. Right now, I'm trying to fill the amazing Nomad Jukebox (which, right now, is probably the shiniest object I own) with albums. If I degenerated to the point of filling it one song at a time, I'd never get any sleep at all.

I mean, not that I get much sleep anyway. Stupid Internet.