Yep my wife is interested in getting an Ipod to listen and store music and possibly some video. Thinking about buying from Walmart.......Bestbuy....NewEgg. Any suggestions. I know about as much about Ipods as Mireland And JM know about women.
The average MP3 is about 5MB. For 1000 songs, she would need 5GB. Although an 8GB Nano costs the same as a 30GB iPod, it uses more rugged flash memory vs. the fragile hard drive in the iPod. Tough call. The iPod does video too, which may or may not be important to her.
There are tons of accessories for both types, but no real "options".
Unless you have a free source for music downloads for iPod, it's going to cost you 99 cents per song and that really adds up. FYI- iPods are not compatible with Napster. Napster is $14.95 per month for unlimited downloads. Of course, the license to play the downloaded songs renews monthly once you connect to their service. Peer to peer is rather risky. My daughter has a Creative Zen Microphoto and it works flawlessly with Napster. She has about 1300 Napster songs on her Zen (equals $1300 from itunes Ouch!!) and is always changing her playlists. Something to consider before making an ipod purchase. Of course, if all you want to load on the ipod is music from your cds, then an ipod should be okay.
You don't have to use iTunes to download the music, you can use any service that lets you download an unprotected wma or mp3 file. You can also just do it the "old fashioned" way and actually buy the CD from the store and rip it to your harddrive, but I know that's just crazy talk :P
Get at least the 30 gb model if you think there's any chance at all she'll want movies. And it'll surprise you at the times she'll watch movies! She may go to the doctor and while waiting want to watch a chick flick to pass the time instead of just listening to music. Most software rips dvd's to mp2's and you can convert those to mp4's in a 320 x 240 format to match the video iPod display. The mp4 version for a standard length movie is about 700 mb - roughly 1/5 what the mp2 was but everything depends on the sampling rates used in the conversion. You'll need to keep drive space in mind on the pc she keeps her library on as adding video gobbles up space fast.
The smaller iPods -nanos and such have only fair battery life while the larger ones last MUCH longer. It stands to reason that with more internal space they can include a higher capacity battery.
Itunes and the way it handles fairuse can be a bit of a pain. If you keep your source files for the content on an external drive and you sync the ipod when the external drive isn't attached the content that was on the external drive won't play on the ipod even though the files are still in the ipod. This is true for movies and any purchased content from Apples's music store. Any music you ripped from your own source to mp3's won't be affected. But it is a pain when you see the file name and try to play on your device and it won't so you regrour at another time, attach the external drive and Apple prompts you for your password and then re-authorizes you to be able to play your own stuff.
Once you teach her the tricks she'll bother you less and less to help figure out the little nags that go with DRM-based systems.
I will always ask this to anyone looking at iPod. Are you SET on buying iPod? Cuz you might wanna look at Creative mp3 players. You don't have to run and convert songs through iTunes to put them on your player, and creatives typically have more features like FM radio built in, and a microphone. Creative players also work with itunes too. Just a heads up. I know alot of people buy iPod for the name, but IMHO Creatives are superior.
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Thats interesting and good to know. We can't install it on Windows 2000 PC's at the office. It errors out. I wonder if we did something on the LAN to break it - a policy or something else. I have about 20 Win2k pc's and they all do the same thing on every version we tried. All of our XP machines work fine and I have 60 of those.
Its odd that we had a policy that said napster, iPod's, music etc.. We not allowed. Now some of our executive management wanted iPods so they changed the policy and told me to support them.