I sat by and watch three generations of iPods come past me. As a stereo-typical early adopter of most technologies, this has been a little strange for me. My last portable audio device was an early-model Sharp mini-disc recorder which saw a lot of use during Uni. Perhaps a little too much, as its proprietary battery eventually all but fell of the perch, meaning that the hacked together charger I had for it (was an imported Japanese model) was eventually a life-line. I left it with a friend when I went overseas and upon return it was an expensive paperweight.
Less than two weeks before the iPod came into my life, I decided that some form of portable audio was necessary for my 35 or so minute walk to the station. It's so much more bearable that way. However, since we are saving for a house even the cheapest iPod was out of the question. I still beleive the price must dive before more people get their hands on these little beauties. So, I grabbed a $80 mp3-compatable CD player from Aldi. The interface was clunky, the software buggy, but the cheap cheap cheap factor worked great, and I had 150 or so songs per CD, burnt in about 10 minutes with two clicks from iTunes.
But the iPod is in a different league. I've invested plenty of hours in my mp3 collection, getting ratings, playlists and id3 tags all just right, and all that time payed off as soon as I connected the iPod for the first time. Sure, to find out that my entire collection wouldn't fit on in one go with the first message was a bit dis-heartening, but iTunes made some selections (no idea how), and then, after only a matter of minutes, there was most of my music, sorted by name, artist, genre, or whatever I wanted. Smart Playlists were in place, everything Just Worked, in that great Apple way.
Physically, the thing is gorgeous to hold and play with, so much so that the only fault I can place is that my grubby fingers constantly leave marks all over it, especially on the shiny back bit. I'm not interested in the iPod mini - this is a great size, and 4GB would be even harder to work with for me.
I think my problem is that I have too diverse musical tastes. My collection includes Elton John, 1920s Blues, Justin Timberlake, Megadeth, Pantera, DJ Ti‘sto, Jamiroquai, The Monkees, Vivaldi and 5GB of jazz. The randomiser is life. Whatever comes up, I can click to rate it out of five, either down to 1 to delete later (quite rare, this is mostly done by now), 2 to mark as not-for-iPod, or 3-5 depending on how much I like it.
This "2 means not for iPod" thing is how I've come to deal with the "Size of music library is greater than capacity of iPod" problem. Plenty of my own CDs I've ripped (whoops, that's
illegal in Australia...) contain say 3 songs I love, 3 which I don't like for one reason or another, and a few others which lie somewhere in the middle. I don't want to delete the ones I don't like, because, especially in the Jazz genre, I will often listen to an album from end to end the way the artist originally intended. Some times it just works better that way. So these "filler" songs stay on the 80GB Powerbook drive, but don't make it to the iPod.
Oh, by the way, if you own a 4G iPod and have worked out that the way they made the prices cheaper was by taking the accessories away, you can partially get this back by partaking of the current promo where if you buy Applecare for iPod you qualify for a free remote. Can't find a link but I have a PDF of it and have confirmed it direct with Apple.