iPod?

[orikes]

So... is an iPod worth it?

I've been looking at mp3 players just out of curiosity, considering if I want to get one or not. The price difference between the iPod and other brands that supposedly do the same thing is a rather vast gulf. What's the advantage to having an iPod over the others?

I like Macs. I'd gladly have one at home for art stuff and keep a PC laptop for surfing, games and MU*. So, I have nothing against Macs. I'm just really curious why the iPod seems to be so much more expensive.

Comments

[jengagne.livejournal.com]

iTunes makes it tremendously easy to arrange, copy, and burn your music. It generally imports music in .AAC format, but you can swap a setting and it'll instead rip your CDs into MP3 format instead of .AAC format.

I have all my CDs ripped into MP3 courtesy of iTunes, so I don't even keep the CDs in my car anymore. It automatically imports all the usual tags like artist, song, album, etc... and you can add your own groupings. For example, I have my music grouped into "legal" and "illegal", heheh...

I also like iPod because I like being able to buy singles online from iTunes. Sure, they're in a protected .AAC format... but they have quite generous use rights permissions. You can burn an unlimited number of mix CDs, share your purchases for free across up to five computers (including those of your friends), yadda yadda. My brother and I swap music like this all the time!

If you're debating, why not get yourself a (free) copy of iTunes and play around with that first?

Other than that, I think the iPods in particular are worth it for their great interface and large screen -- that lets you see a lot of info about each song and scroll through all sorts of menus and your customized playlists, which I appreciate. Or if you don't care about playlists, grab the iPod shuffle.