So you want an iPod…?

By Glenn Rigby
I bought an iPod about 2 months ago, and it has completely changed my music-listening experience. Prior to this, I carried around a discman with three or four cd's in my pocket for a little variety. As a guy with 300+ cd's, and who constantly has music playing, this was very restricting.
Now I carry 3,300+ songs in my iPod and can easily select between different play lists, albums, artists, or just shuffle through all the songs. I haven't even imported all of my cd's into digital tracks, yet! Soon enough, though, my entire collection will be ready to go.
I chose to grab the player with 60 gigabytes of storage; that's a lot. My Macbook laptop has 60 gigs, and when you take into account all the software and programs taking up room on it, there's not much space left for music. That means that I will eventually have to take some songs off my computer to make room for new ones, but I would hate to just throw them away. This brings me to another fun feature of the iPod: Storage!
This music player has a hard-drive – it doesn't operate on flash memory as some of the other mp3-players do (including the iPod Shuffle). That means that it not only plays iTunes-imported songs, but also acts as an external storage device that can hold, store and transport every type of digital media. No need to buy a flash drive when you have one of these guys.
If you want to get fancy (as I did), you can get yourself the video version. This addition to the iPod family has the capability to playback videos; music videos, home movie clips – you name it. All you have to do is have the files in iTunes, go to preferences and "sync" the files or folders to your iPod.
Photos can also be stored and attractively displayed on the 30 and 60 GB models. I'm trying not to get too carried away, but I do have a whole lot of pictures on mine. Everything from friends to failed Photoshop projects are easily at my disposal. There is a slideshow feature available with customizable settings, allowing you to automatically flip through selected folders of pictures in various styles. This feature is possibly only for the serious photo buff.