iTunes Purchase Part 2

I decided to buy some more songs yesterday so I went back to iTunes (see first entry).

I recently bought four Led Zeppelin CD’s through Columbia House because they had a Buy 1 Get 3 Free offer. At the music store one CD was $17 and the box set was something like $90 for all their music. But by buying this one album plus shipping and taxes I wound up getting 4 albums for $32 (which gave me enough bonus points for another free album). Otherwise I’d have never bought Led Zep 3, but you really do need 1 and 2 and Houses of the Holy is probably my favorite (already had IV).

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Holiday Programming

One of the iPod’s more dubious but highly geeky features is the ability to store addresses, appointments, and notes just like a PDA. The iPod’s lack of any decent way of entering text means you can’t enter anything so you still need your Palm (or Outlook if you are Palmless) to actually enter all the info. So that means you need a way of dumping the info from the Palm (in my case) to the iPod.

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iTunes Purchase

When I got the iPod I also had to get Apple’s iTunes (well, not really; I wound up sticking with Windows 98 and using Ephpod to get songs onto the iPod, but I did set up a Windows 2000 hard drive and load iTunes on it).

After a number of weeks I finally got all the security patches in place for Windows 2000 and felt like I could take iTunes for a spin on the internet and download some songs. 99 cents per song is really pretty reasonable. I’ve bought entire albums before because they had 3 good songs. The problem with downloading is you don’t actually have something to hold. I think that tangible ownership is an important part of having music, but maybe I’m just old fashioned. Cover art used to be giant and double albums (and plenty of single albums) would open up to even bigger artwork in the middle. CD covers just aren’t as impressive though some of the disc graphics are kind of neat.

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Archos Use

I let Jeb borrow my Archos indefinitely. It is a great device, with a 20 GB hard drive that will play MP3’s but also act as an external hard drive (at least to Windows machines).

You can download the drivers at:

http://www.archos.com/download/drivers.html?country=us

It is a Archos Jukebox, not a recorder. In particular it is the Archos Jukebox Studio 20.

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Dish Network PVR

This is a response to a person on AMUG who was thinking about buying a PVR and asked for advice . . .

I bought a Dish PVR 500 (or 501?) a couple of years ago. It’s the greatest thing since color. It records about 1 hour per gigabyte. Mine has a 40 GB drive in it and that’s really plenty. I’ve got stuff on there I’ve saved for months (if you don’t protect a show, then the oldest shows will automatically be deleted to make room for new shows when the hard drive gets full) and not watched that I could get rid of if I needed the space. Now they have much bigger hard drives so I don’t see that as being a problem.

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