To say that my Creative Zen Vision:M is getting a little long in the tooth is an understatement. 30 gigabytes is simply not enough storage for any self-respecting music fan. Herein lies the problem: NO ONE is making an excellent high-capacity mp3 player. To get the obvious out of the way, I refuse to buy an iPod. Refuse, refuse, refuse. My reasoning is simple: The customizability on the iPod is atrocious, iTunes is garbage, and I’m not going to help perpetuate the Apple Cult. With that out of the way, my only other option at the moment is the Cowon iAudio X5, a player so close to the verge of being discontinued that I’m not even giving it a second thought. So what is every digital audio player manufacturer on the Earth busying itself with at the moment? Shoddy flash memory-based players with paltry memory or hulking and unnecessary personal media players with criminally bad battery life. Who honestly watches video on a 2.5” screen? Anyone? If so, why?
There is nothing inherently impossible in what I’m looking for. I feel like an LP enthusiast circa the late 1980’s, when it seems as if the market is taking huge steps backwards and perpetuating garbage. I’ll provide a basic break down what I want:
- At least 100GB of storage
- Support for mp3, but support for FLAC and OGG should ideally be included as well.
- A reasonably decent screen. I don’t care about watching movies on the thing, but I would like to see album art and have a custom background.
- Good to excellent playlist creation. The last player I had with decent options in creating a playlist on the player itself was a monstrous Zen Xtra in 2003. Every player I’ve had since then has been a gigantic step backwards. Whoever thought it was acceptable to require users to create playlists on their PCs and import those to the player shouldn’t qualify as human. And this “on-the-go” playlist nonsense is shameful.
- Absolutely no software required. No bullshit, bloated proprietary software should be necessary to drag my already-organized collection over to.
That’s it. I will put up with lackluster design and fiddle with half-assed controls if need be. It consistently amazes me that people are willing to put up with crap like iTunes and the limited functionality of the severely-crippled mass-market players. I don’t claim to be any sort of digital audio expert, but seriously, there isn’t a single good mp3 player on the market at the moment, and a soon-to-be discontinued player by a minor company is the best we’ve got. Are my expectations too high or are people just willing to settle for crap time and again?
As a general rule, I don’t get too wrapped up in politics. The way I see it, life seems too short and full of other, more worthwhile distractions. That said, one can’t help but get a little more involved and informed around election years, because even as someone who rarely watches television and never listens to the radio, it’s impossible not to overhear things in passing or see a news item trying to get to my email. In what little coverage I’ve seen so far, the most interesting person to emerge as a candidate has been Texas senator Ron Paul. There are a few of Paul’s positions that I dislike or don’t necessarily agree with, but at least he will tell you exactly where he stands on an issue and refuses to back down and reverse his statements based on popular opinion. This is even stranger considering that Paul is seeking the nomination of the Republican party, a party I generally find myself loathing. In 2004 I held my nose and voted for John Kerry, as I felt he was the least moronic of two barely-distinguishable numbskulls. I think it was an Adbusters magazine I was flipping through while drinking coffee downtown one evening where I happened upon a poem in the letters section that went something like this:
American politics
Republican ideas are dumb
and Democrats have none
Short, sweet and most importantly, true, which, as the late Bill Hicks once said “gives it the force, that extra oomph.” Coming back to Ron Paul, he seems to me to be the most honorable of the candidates running on either side of the metaphorical fence. The thing that bothers me most about the Democratic party is that they can never find a solid position from which to assert their views. In 2004 they seemed to run on a platform of “At least he’s not Bush!” Now, as the next election approaches, they seem to be running on another substance-free ‘rock star’ platform. Instead of coming to the table with actual ideas and solid arguments, they’re offering little more than an unproven senator and a seemingly universally-disliked senator and former First Lady, banking hard on the fact that their prize horses are black and female, respectively. Is it any wonder, then, that even when the opposition very often seems so out of tune with the American public, that the alternative seems an even shittier choice?
Here are three videos of Ron Paul in the debates thus far, his words for the most part coming across like a wrecking ball of common sense. Time will tell whether Paul will remain as golden as he seems at the moment, but right now he’s looking pretty damn good.
The latest strategy in my battle against getting laid consists of trying out Linux. I’m really not hard to please when it comes to my expectations for a computer, it’s just that mine is admittedly getting a little long in the tooth and I’m not in a position at the moment to replace it, so I figure what the hell, I’ll try another operating system. The image of the Linux loser is still pretty intact in my mind, if only because it’s not a very newb-friendly environment to jump into without some sort of google-fetched floaties to keep one from drowning in technical jargon.
So far I’ve managed to get mp3s playing in Linux and have been able to import mp3s from my Windows drive (no small feat considering it took several google searches, a couple submenus and a cut ‘n’ paste into the terminal to get things rolling). The aesthetics are pretty nice, but it’s all still sort of a maze for this fish out of water. It is sort of odd to be out of my element, though. I don’t really use my PC for much besides music, internet, email, etc., so those basics are still pretty easy to get a grap on with Linux, it’s just the whole installing, command lines and all that other shit I can’t seem to grasp so far. The only physically annoying thing about Linux is that it has my PC’s fan going all the time, whereas it was only on during startup in Windows. I guess time will tell whether or not I attempt to make some sort of switch or stick with what I’m used to, but I’m sort of leaning towards the latter at the moment, though I’ll probably leave it on my computer if only to learn a little more about it.
