No iPods allowed

I’ve blogged about this topic earlier, but some things deserve extra time in the sunshine. As some of you know, I’ve been batting around the idea of acquiring a new digital music player. While I’m very fond of my iRiver iFP-790, my recent fascination with Amazon mp3 downloads has shown me (reminded me?) that 256MB is not a particularly generous amount of storage these days. Still, I’m serious when I declare that my iFP-790 has served me very well, and it dawned on me the other day that as I’ve embarked on this search for the successor to my trusty digital music player in red, I’m basically looking for the exact same player, but with more storage space.

There is an amazing assortment of digital music players on the market, and I have to confess that at times I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by all the choices. Chosing the right digital music player can be a bit of a process, and you probably don’t want to venture forth into this journey without a guide, or at the very least a sherpa. Anythingbutipod.com has helped a lot, and has a great compare feature, although I think there are some bugs in it. Anyway, for a while, I was intrigued by Microsoft’s oft-touted Zune–the wireless syncing feature seemed like a nice upgrade–but had to nix that idea after discovering it doesn’t even support Ogg Vorbis, my preffered audio compression format and the format in which the majority of my digital music library resides. Ultimately, I decided that it was pointless to find a new brand when I was so happy with iRiver. I’m very very close to settling on the iRiver LPlayer, pictured at right. It’s got all the features of my current player, with some added enhancements of course (auto FM tuning, wow–yes, I still want, and use a lot, the FM tuner on my player, to get all the NPR nuggets of knowledge that I can squeeze into the day), lots more size, and has very modest dimensions, something that is coming a bit of a de facto requirement for my electronic gadget purchases. The LPlayer also uses the nifty D-link navigation method – basically, you use the frame of the player to navigate menus and select options, which seems innovative to me. If it weren’t for all the new iRiver players that have been announced for CES 2009 this year… I would’ve gotten this player already.

In other news, I’ll be out of town for a while attending a wedding in the Domincan Republican. Oh yeah. This will be my first trip to a tropical island resort ever, and the first real vacation I’ve taken since I started working (that is to say, the first time that I’ve ever taken more than 2 consecutive days off of work for purely personal reasons). Needless to say, I am eagerly anticipating this trip. The camera is already charged, so pictures should be abound for this trip. And of course, while I’m enjoying the sun in tropical weathers, Seattle should be having its own personal time with temperatures in the upper 20s and snow showers. That’s fantastic.

Other random items of note: Charlie Wilson’s War is a very entertaining movie (although for some reason I keep referring to it as Charlie Gibson’s War…) and I was nearly speechless today when I was all set to pay $18 for a new version of Ryan Farish’s album Everlasting at the local CD store (yes, occassionaly I still buy CDs… mostly when Amazon doesn’t have an mp3 version available and I need to load up on my music before I set out on long international flights) and then I happened upon a used–yet pristine version–of the exact same album for $10. Sounds good to me!