h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, finally, due to strange silly circumstances, I find myself the proud owner of an mp3 player. And in the interests of Research (after all, what are we here for? here being hootoo of course) here are my findings.

But first, how did I come to buy an mp3 player? I'm a bit of a gadget girl. The first time I heard about iPods I just simply had to have one. Still do want one, in fact, but at over 400 Euros for the 60GB version, I guess I'll be wanting for quite a while.

Anyhooo - my scanner broke. So yesterday evening I persuaded and the Gruesome Twosome that I would not exist one nanosecond further unless I got a new one. And off we trundled to the local Media Markt.

I managed to keep my mitts off the machine until this morning, when I discovered, to my embarassment that there was nothing wrong with the old scanner that connecting it back up to the power cable wouldn't solve. The upside of the visit to Media Markt was that I checked my "broken" cordless phone too, and discovered that it would work if only I would feed it some new batteries

But I digress. Now I found myself in possession of a superfluous scanner. Tempting to keep it, however, because my old one is ancient and probably works because there is a little guy inside making faithful pen and ink copies of anything I care to scan.

Last evening, as is usual for me, I spent a goodly amount of time dribbling on the mp3 players, and finally talking round into the idea that they are A Good Thing. Helped along, it must be said, by the fact that his portable CD player has just bitten the dust (and he likes to have music while he cycles to work). We decided that he'd be happy with an iPod shuffle if I could have one of the bigger versions (probably the 20gb one).

Anyway - I'm getting there - this morning I took the scanner back for a refund. And picked up two 'cheapo' 218mb mp3 players. I then spent an unprofitable and extraordinarily long time trying to get iTunes to work with my desktop (no luck, I'm running WindowsME on that one). Eventually, got it loaded on the notebook, only to have to wrestle for hours - I lost.

Finally I found Musicmatch Jukebox and while that too only works on the notebook, at least I managed to make it work without having to kill everyone in the village to calm myself down. So now I'm having to use the notebook on the internet, so that I can have the artist/tracks on the pesky electronic things - but

YAAAYYYY!

I can have music while I jog, without having to pull a trolley along behind me with my Walkman (remember them?) on it. And when I/we eventually get the lovely iPods we desire, the Gruesome Twosome will get these mp3 thingys. Everybody is happy.

Except my poor ol' walkman which will be scrapped.

Or maybe not.

Does it have a line in socket?

If so, with a male to male cable plugged into the speaker jack of your pc and then into the mp3 player, you can record directly from the CD/DVD drive. You can hear what you are recording over the earphones of your mp3 player.

Sometimes you don't always need a hi-tech method to transfer your favourite tunes.

I use Napster for downloading.

now I'm very confused....

Not as counfused as me!

was all excited yesterday when I was attempting to convert some music for him. Finally, I said "but I have some mp3s, want to listen?"

Ho yus he did.
Until he heard Martin Shaw naratting The Hobbit. I love it through my wee headphones (though no good for running) but was less than impressed.I threatened him with LOTR today

And all thanks to Ms. LSF! yaayyyyy!

Glad I could be of assistance!

I may have shown you my MP3 player when we met. The best thing about it is that it takes little cards like a digital camera and you don't need lots of players, you can just insert these tiny, stamp-size cards.

I use a program called AudioCatalyst to convert my CDs to mp3 format to copy them on to the player. I've also used it to transfer files from my work PC to my home one, and have also taken files to the Copy Shop to get him to print them out.

Mine's full of my Polish which I listen to while biking to work - and my son is thinking of doing the same to learn French on the train.