now I can buy an ipod

over the past 3 months I have decided to warehouse all of my cd collection and move completely digital. as opposed to just adding new ones to winmp whenever I get them.

this is due to a number of reasons:

• I have over 700 cds
• I have 2.5 yr old that now knows how to get into my stereo cabinet, load up a cd etc
• I thought it would be good from a storage perspective – I can put all of the cds in lockable plastic crates in the storage cupboards, instead of 2.5 yr old working out how he could make them fly
• I’m thinking of an ipod type device to move some of my music on – or maybe the rumoured ifone by apple next year

so each nite I try to burn as many cds as I can – about 20 in a sitting – down to 320kbps mp3 setting.

I’m about 140 cds short of finishing, and when I do finish I’ll probably knock up a media centre machine for the family to use. I’ve now filled up about 50gb in hard drive space.

but it got me thinking:

1. what teenage child of the ipod demographic has 50gb (legitimately) of music that they could save, if they had originally owned it
2. why would a teenage ipod demographic need 60gb of ipod drive to store data
3. how anal am I now going to be about saving this music data vs just having the cds around, after going through the punishing exercise of converting the damn things
4. what happens to an ipod drive over time of adding / deleting music in terms of its performance – does it need defragging or any other type of system maintenance (or have I spurned a new app for the ipod?)
5. if your ipod dies in the backside from a disk error, is the hard drive recoverable like other hard drives

all these questions and more…because now I am more scared than ever of losing my music!