I've Joined The iPod Revolution

I know, iPod's have been around for awhile now and they're not exactly new technology, but they're new to me, so they are now officially cool. We have been planning our summer trip to Washington for a few months, and one day HolyCoast daughter asked if she could bring all her CDs on the trip. She likes lots of different music (thankfully none of it Rap - when they named that style of music they forgot to put the "C" on it). She's into classical and instrumental stuff, and HolyCoast son likes jazz and brass stuff, and both have lots of CDs. I did a little research, talked to some friends who know more about this stuff than I do, and decided to buy the kids early "good grades" presents - iPod Minis. When we go to Washington they'll each have a small portable player rather than a much larger CD player and stacks of CDs.

(Disclaimer: If you are already well versed in iPod technology, you'll probably be bored with the rest of this post. You can skip to the end for more news about iPods.)

These little babies are pretty amazing. Each can hold up to 1,000 songs (average of 4 minutes each - 4 gigabytes total) and play everything back in digital quality as good as the original recording. All of that in a package smaller than a cigarette pack. It organizes your music, and the iTunes software that comes with it makes downloading your CDs very easy.

After a couple of days spent working with the kids and setting up their iPods, I came to the realization that I just had to have one for myself. I have a couple of hundred CDs cluttering up our bedroom, and the iPod Mini was going to be too small to handle all my stuff. I decided to treat myself to a belated birthday present and bought the 20 gig iPod. I also got the FM transmitter for the car and the voice recorder attachment. I'm a regular digital music machine.

Yesterday I spent hours transferring CDs over to the iPod, and I'm not even near halfway done. I've already downloaded about 500 songs with many more to go. My iPod can store up to 5,000 songs, so even if I load up every CD I own, there will still be lots of room for more. Pretty amazing. And all those CDs which have been kept in a storage tower in our bedroom will be boxed up and put in the garage, much to the approval of Mrs. HolyCoast.

Having said all that, Bill Gates is suggesting that cellphones will soon replace the iPod in popularity and the handy little devices will not be able to sustain their popularity:

Microsoft founder Bill Gates sees mobile phones overtaking MP3s as the top choice of portable music players, and views the raging popularity of Apple's iPod player as unsustainable, he told a German newspaper.

"As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run," he said in an interview published in Thursday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface -- like the iPod today -- and then lost its position," Gates said.

Leave it to me to spend a fortune buying technology right before it goes out of fashion.