Just Barely Photography Related…

I have had my Archos MP3 player for years now. I got it right at the time Ipods were just coming out. The Archos has been a great player although it is the size and weight of a brick. It has worked great for thousands of hours of play.

I used it at work (when I had a desk job) or when traveling and its size and weight were not too much of an issue. Well, the time and miles have taken their toll and the Archos is nearly dead. The battery is about shot, the case has warped and if allowed to gape, it powers itself off, and compared to the newer players, it’s obsolete.

For V-Day, my wife bought me a San Disk Sansa e260. While smaller capacity (20gig for the Archos, 4 gig for the Sansa), the increase in the number of features make it a superior device. Not only does it play music, but also videos and photos. Plus its menu is bright, large, and colorful. My Archos’ display was a B&W LCD about the size and viewability of a Timex Ironman watch.

The downside to the new player is that I have to re-rip songs. The old player was in esssence an external harddrive with a music player attached. Songs had to be organized into directories and subdirectories based on artists and albums. If I try to copy the directories from the old player to the new one, all the songs get lumped into the same directory. This is because the new player is database driven. The database, not the directory structure, organizes the music. While being a pain in the butt to start with, in the long run, it makes it easier to organize, sort, and find music.

Ok, this doesn’t have too much to do with photography, other than I can put some of my fave photos on my new MP3 player and keep them with me and they don’t take up much space. Oh, another thing that makes this photo related, is that, along with my 5 CD changer, I also hook my my MP3 player to my large (150 watt per channel) stereo at the studio. It’s nice not to have to change CDs alot. I also let customers hook up their own MP3 player so we can crank up music that they like.

Oh well, that’s it for today.  🙂