The Digital Music Age Begins

OK, that title is overstating it.

I've been listening to "digital" music (from CDs) for years. And over the past couple of years, I've been listening to music ripped from my CDs onto my computer(s) at least as often as listening to music on stereos. But, until today, I had not joined the throng of people who own an "MP3 Player." Today, I crossed over.

It was only a matter of time. I love music. I listen to music much more frequently than one would have expected, had one known me in my youth. The availability of music on my computer has been a joy.

Well, my parents gave me a gift certificate to Best Buy for my birthday. As I have mentioned before, this is a really excellent gift for me. I love Best Buy. I love "window shopping" there -- anticipating what I could get if I had the money. So, getting a gift certificate allows me to spend some delicious time savoring the possibilities before I purchase. And then it lets me get the thing I want.

This time, the gift certificate did not sit with me for long, however. When I looked at the Best Buy ad in this weekend's paper, there was a $99 MP3 player on sale, with a free docking station. It was a SanDisk, which I knew as a good brand (if you're not going to buy an iPod, you have many other "off-brand" options.)

So, at lunch today, I stopped and bought it. Thanks to my parents, it cost me just a few dollars more.

I think I'm going to really like it. I find that it has less room than I expected -- I think I save my music at a higher fidelity than the MP3 makers would recommend, so I can't fit as many songs as I hoped. And apparently the software takes nearly a half of the 2 GB -- strange ^[1]. But nevertheless, I will happily load it up with 100 songs and have funny little buds hanging from my ears as I listen to some of my favorite music from this slim solid-state technological marvel.

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^[1] Follow-up: I was able to attach the player (a SanDisk Sansa e250R, by the way) to my computer as if it were removable storage. When I did this, and poked around the folders, I found a large number of .rax files in the system/music/ directory. I didn't know what a .rax file was, so Google helped me find out that it's the proprietary format used by "Real Audio." I happen to use Real Player (not iTunes or Windows Media Player) to listen to and manage my music on my computers, so I understood how to try to play these files. I copied a few to my computer, but Real Player told me I didn't have the rights to the files. "Well," thought I, "if I don't have the rights, and they are essentially random, I will just delete them." So I did, and I got back almost 1 GB of space. Now, after a few fits and starts, I have the player loaded with about 300 songs.