20 GBs isn't enough for me... and I have a 30 GB hard drive on my computer...

Yeah. I love my iRiver H120 — it's a really good player — but I wish I had spent the extra £40 and got an H140. If I can't fit my whole CD collection onto it and have room to spare, it isn't big enough.

...whatever happened to the radio?
I guess I don't understand.
I guess I can be happy listening to the same ten songs over and over for a long time. One MP3 CD lasts me three months. Then I get another one and pop it in for three months.

I have to say that on a completely asthetic level... that black iNano looks totally hot. Its so sleek and slim.

I find the radio highly irritating to listen to, mostly because DJs are such idiots I often want to commit acts of violence against them. But even more than that, I don't get a good radio signal at work. I either have to bring my own music, or do without. And since I'm listening to the playlist for six hours at a stretch five days a week, I like it to be long enough that I can handle not changing it for a week at a time without getting bored of what's on it.

I found out that 512 mb is enough for a week of listening for me, mixing in the occasional listening to FM :-) However, if you're listening for several hours every day, "your mileage may vary"

Bah. I fail to see the big deal. Sure, its got a color screen, but other than that it's just a really small Ipod. Am I missing something?

Good gravy!

Exactly how big are your collections?

"As near as dammit CD quality" encoding of my entire collection (21 days and a few minutes - 500+ albums at last count) only occupies 11.56Gb on my home PC...

I've only got about a 3.5GB collection, consisting entirely of CDs I own and a bit of music that's freely distributed on the Web by its owners. Mostly 192-224Kbps MP3s and 160Kbps VBR .OGGs (the larger portion), which I find sound just as good as the MP3s and use up slightly less space. That includes an audiobook that came on 12 CDs that we purchased used from the library and now fits into a mere 530MB of space (it sure made the recent nine-hour drive up to Reno go by faster). Although, I don't exactly have an MP3 player - I use a six-year-old laptop hooked up to an APC Smart-UPS Uninterruptable Power Supply that I've wired the battery connections for into my car's cigarette lighter (the laptop battery only lasts two hours, hence the use of a hacked UPS serving as an inverter*). Significantly bulkier and harder to use than any iPod :P

*-And the laptop has a built-in power supply, rather than external, so it only accepts AC wall current.

Far too small at 272 albums*.


How are you encoding those? I use Lame's 'preset-standard' setting (VBR averaging about 190kbps) and they average at about 70 MiB/album. Which does fit under 20GiB (it's about 18.5GiB), but not by all that much. It might all fit on for the moment, but it might not for all that much longer, and it doesn't leave much room for recording or anything like that.

Of course, I could use Ogg Vorbis instead of mp3, which would save a bit of space, but I've heard that the extra work involved in decoding Vorbis can make the battery run down faster.

*(That I legitimately own, anyway.)

Not sure I do, either, Jade. And I'm a musician myself -- Bachelor's of Music in Performance and Music Education from Ithaca College, thanks very much. And my CD collection is... well, it probably numbers around 30-40. Small. Maybe it's because I was surrounded by music, non-stop, all day, every day... but I really appreciate SILENCE once in a while. I can't understand the people who walk around listening to music all day. Don't you ever want to turn it OFF?

I first realized it in a conversation with my dad about running. He commented that he couldn't understand running while listening to music... he feels (and I agree) that going running is a way to get away from everything and be alone with your thoughts. Listening to music the whole time would defeat that purpose.

Maybe it's bitterness -- the recording industry really messed up the whole concert-attendance thing. Time was, people ALWAYS showed up for ANY concert, because music was otherwise impossible to come by. Now, people can have days' worth of music in their pockets. Why bother with the symphony any more?

As far as radio... I'm an NPR/classical music station geek. It's about the only station I can listen to for any length of time and not go crazy from hearing the same track played over and over and over again.

If the cat can swallow it, it's too small.

Currently, on my computer, I have 2691 Songs from 93 different Artists and 218 different Albums. And most of those are whole CDs. I have very few singles. The only ones that come to mind are two versions of Blue Monday (New Order and Orgy) It will play for 6 days, 15 hours, 31 minutes, and 19 seconds. It takes up 10.32 GB

But my hard drive is only 30 GB, so I have another 11 - 12 GBs of music waiting for me to get an external hard drive and/or a new computer.

Well, you'll get it back soon enough if she does, so it's not TOO big an issue.

For those of you questioning the durability of the nano, here are a couple of guys who drove a car over one and it more or less kept right on ticking...