Will's blog

I'm tossing around getting an mp3 player again. My car only has a tape deck and the radio reception is kind of flakey for no apparent reason I can discern [1]. Also, I take the T around town frequently and it'd be nice to have a portable device that I can listen to at work, on my work commute, at home, on the T, and in other places.

I don't really need to upload my entire music collection. Having said that, I'm a mood-centric music listener and I have a bunch of different moods and it'd be nice to have at least 10 or 20 songs for each mood. Thus I've tossed around getting a hard-drive based player.

I'd rather have a player that doesn't require a fancy gui thingy on my host computer. Having said that, I realize those gui's are nice since they frequently build an index of the songs on the drive, so it makes boot up of the player much faster. I HATE Creative Labs Music Center (or whatever it's called). I've never used iTunes. I don't need something to categorize my life--just something to load songs onto the mp3 player.

I don't really care about size, but I'd like the player to fit in my pocket. I don't care about cool-factor. I don't care about user interfaces as long as I can select songs to play, play them, and skip songs I don't feel like listening to. I don't care about playing solitare or about organizing my life. A remote control would be nice but it's not necessary.

The battery has to last at least 6 hours and it's not acceptable for it to die in a year.

I don't want to pay a fortune. It has to be available at amazon.com.

And that's as far as I've gotten on this train of thought. Email willg at bluesock dot org if you have ideas [2].

[1] - I could be parked NEXT TO the WBUR tower and all I get is hiss one day, but the next day it comes in just fine--heck if I know what the problem is.

[2] - I keep tossing around adding comments to my blog. I don't think that many people read it and want to comment on it and I don't feel like dealing with comment spam. Maybe I'll add it next week for a trial period to see if it works out or not.