I think it was my first ever post in this blog that I mentioned about buying a portable music device in the near future. Normally, this is no more complicated than buying a dvd player, camera or a stereo system. Fix a budget with some uncertainty, do a search on existing models, look at the up and coming models, prioritize your needs from the device and buy the best product that matches your needs and price range.
When it comes down to portable music devices, the story is a lot more complicated because of the following three letters: DRM. There are loads of talk, discussion, opposition on DRM which I will not go into (not right now at least) but if you do, this techcrunch post and the subsequent trackbacks and comments are not a bad place to start. Basically the main problem is when buying a portable music player, you not only buy a technical device that plays music in certain digital formats but you also pledge yourself (assuming you do not download illegally and/or your only source of music is not audio cd's where you create your mp3's from) to a specific music purchasing environment (as in ipod/itunes) as long as you keep that player and/or the songs you purchased from that music store. Because of the licensing, say you have an ipod and you bought 500 songs from itunes in a span, if a time comes where you have/want to change your player, you'll have to forget about those 500 songs as well even though you've paid for them. Not even that complicated: If you have an ipod but have a lot music in the regular mp3 format that say you acquired perfectly legally from e-music * and suddenly Apple decides to change the ipod's firmware such that it won't play regular mp3's, again you're practically screwed - you have to give up all your songs from itunes if you want to buy a new ipod. Actually it's not even about the money. For avid and passionate music listeners like me who seriously spend time and energy to find and purchase good music to listen to, it's not a pleasant stance to experience the possibility of losing a large part of the hardly acquired music collection.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that once you make your choice, you're very affected by the current and future decisions of record labels, music stores and the hardware companies and it's important to make an informed and well thought decision. A lot of people don't even think about this issue when buying a player and usually that's my stance as well on a lot of other equipment purchases but finding, acquiring and storing good music that I find is very important for me. In the next post I'll try to explain my current stand and in the coming ones I'll hopefully talk about other alternatives.
2 comments:
Dear avram, buy an ipod, don't think about these issues. OR, if you'd like to use ruckus, as long as you're a student, which will probably mean for a long time, you should buy a ruckus-compatible one. Then, at least, the music is free :)
tiginim,
there's more to come don't worry:)
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