I came home from work to find a package with the item pictured at left and an "Enclosed please find your gift" letter. Although I guess it's barely a gift as it'll probably be on a 1099 - I'm not going to complain though.
So far I'm mostly happy with it. Other than a ridiculous level of background hiss noticeable in any quieter portions of music (or between songs, or when paused), the sound quality is quite good. I think this may be attributable to the ridiculously overpowered headphone amp (even with the included headphones I hope nobody listens at over about a third), and the fact that it's much less noticeable with the included headphones (of course most of the detail in music is gone too). I may have to try an attenuator. I'm still not a real fan of the scroll wheel - now that I actually own one though it'll be interesting to see how much I use it compared to my other player. The better song selection because of the ID3 database may push me towards it, but the having to use an installed program and only Windows/OS X to sync music (and having to re-rip to MP3) may push me away. At least this thing is supposed to have a halfway decent battery life.
It's from a bank. I took out a short-term loan where even without the iPod the fees ended up being about zero, and I can earn more interest even in T Bills than I have to pay for the loan. :)
what format is your music in now, ogg or flac?
I'd think there'd be some transcoding route or are you concerned with further degradation of the music?
C'mon mooney, roll apple lossless across the board :)
Mostly ogg (most q8 or q9), so I don't want to transcode. I think I need to rip to flac and maintain a system where I can transcode to lossy as necessary without re-ripping, as I also want to be able to play music at home to actually listen to it without digging out the CDs. The issue with Apple Lossless is only one of my machines can really play it without extra work - I think the format really only exists because there's no standard for a DRM wrapper around flac.
It works pretty well. I've been using it as my main player during the day, mainly because it just has a more current selection of music I want on it. It did end up getting confused and displaying the wrong song and not updating the song time for a while (even stuck through power cycling), but that corrected itself after a couple rounds in and out of the menu. It also has refused to skip songs a couple times (but can navigate otherwise OK), but that may be something intentional I haven't discovered yet in the excessively overloaded UI controls.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
How did you get one for a gift? I wish one would end up on my doorstep.