About 5 years ago, in the middle of a brutal Colorado winter, I decided to rip all the music CD’s that we had into MP3 format, get them on a hard drive, and organize it all. I never got into music “file sharing” like the original Napster or any of the other incarnations of torrent downloads, not only because they were and are illegal, but as a computer repair business, I had seen too many viruses getting transmitted to unsuspecting clients.
All in all, our music collection totaled a little over 22GB of MP3’s. Other than playing them on our computers, we never had a portable MP3 player, until now. As a Christmas present to myself, I purchased a used 6th generation iPod Classic with an 80GB hard drive from a reliable seller on Ebay. The 2000 Ford Windstar van that we drive has a non-functional CD player in it, but a functioning cassette player. I bought a cassette adaptor for the iPod so that we can use it in the van. I also bought an adaptor to plug the iPod into our home stereo system.
Before I loaded our music collection onto my Macbook, I made two backup copies of the “clean” MP3’s. After importing the MP3’s into iTunes, I connected the iPod and downloaded our music collection to it. Carolyn and I are having a ball creating “playlists” of our favorite tunes. One of the things I really like about the iPod is the ability to download audio and video from our favorite TV programs.
So there it is, Carolyn and I are finally listening to our iPod, only about 10 years behind the times.