I managed to make my iTunes to exceed the 4 kilosong barrier this weekend. I actually have a lot more music than that, but it’s not properly tagged, and it takes a long time to sort all of that out. The 4,159 songs in my iTunes library occupies about 20GB which means my iPod is over 33% full now.

I listened to random folks prattling downloaded some Podcasts for the first time tonight. About the only thing I could find interesting was some interviews with Phil Lesh and Nick Mason. I’m still waiting for a lowdrag.org podcast.

When the iPod Shuffle was released, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about it due to the fact that I already own a Diamond…Sonic Blue…Rio Audio S50. The S50 is nice and gets crazy batter life (if you remember to turn it off when not in use). It’s got a stopwatch, FM tuner, and a nice backlit display. The best part is that this unit is over three years old!

The only real problem with the Rio: SOFTWARE! Has anyone every tried to use it? It’s got the absolute worst imaginable interface possible. Also, when you start it for the first time, don’t bother telling it where your music is located unless you enjoy waiting for 17 hours whilst it categorizes every file. I can just imagine little Billy getting one for Christmas and pointing it to his vast collection of Clear Channel/MTV-approved music. By New Year’s Eve, the Rio should be nearly 43% done categorizing on his Packard Bell Crapmaster 5000.

Eventually, I discovered the Windows Media Player supports the Rio S50. The interface is slightly more usable, however, it forces you to re-encode everything into WMA. WMA (Windows Media Audio) is actually good for the Rio as you can fit twice as many tracks on the device. Here’s the kicker with Windows Media Player, when you encode the track, it goes to the Rio and that’s the end of it. So, if you want to delete tracks off the Rio, you’ve lost the result of your previous transcoding (converting one codec to another) efforts. Transcoding mp3 to wma takes an eternity too. To me, this is like, “I just factored a 1024-bit number, but I’m done with it now. So, I’m going to throw it way and recalculate next time I need it!” That seems mega-stupid to me.

When I got my iPod in October, I started using iTunes to manage my vast collection of tracks, and I was amazed at how easy it was to use, and how fast I could transfer tracks to the iPod. I even associated album art with every track too. Using iTunes had the added benefit of forcing me to correctly tag everything in my collection as well.

So, Creative and Rio Audio can scoff at the iPod Shuffle, however, they had a 6 year head start at producing a usable flash-based media player, and failed. I think this was mostly due to the DRM in Microsoft Windows Media Player, poorly written software and drivers, and the lack of a legal download service. I think that iTMS, the iTunes Music Store, is the killer app here, and the iPod is the cost of joining the party.