Buying an MP3 or External Hard Drive

Hi: 

Hi:

If you are planning to buy an MP3, consider carfully the number of gb's you buy.  One gb holds about five cd's, depending on the length of the CD, of course.

But think about your other uses, especially if you  travel, and compare costs.  We originally bought an IPod, 4b for around $220. Canadian.  We wanted to download our CD collection and also be able to store pictures.  It became apparent after a day or two that this was not nearly enough hard drive space.  We returned the first one and for around $100 more bought a 60GB MP3 which has an FM radio and plays videos as well as stores pictures and CD's.  It has the capacity for 1,200 CD's, far more than we would ever use. 

However, if we travel for several  months and  also use it to load pictures from our digital camera, it might be surprising how much space we use.

With a large CD collection, we are taking the time to organize into playlists.  We listen to a lot of genres, but classical music is a large category for us, so we have broken it down into composers.  This does mean an extra step in the rip-organize-sync, but with several hundred CD's, organizing makes it manageable.

This has been a learning curve for us, as well, and quite fun. We have also borrowed a few CD's from the library, and found some surprisingly good albums that we would never have bought.

M.