Well, after sitting in my parents closet for a few weeks (you don't know how tempting it was to go in there and crack 'er open), my birthday has come and I have been granted my new 15 GB iPod. I had an mp3 player once, it was some rio device that sounded bad and held like 13 songs. I don't think I used it more then twice. I've used my iPod more in less then one day...

Even my mom was impressed with the packaging. It was so nice to actually hold it in my hands. It came with a couple bars of charge so it was a relief to be able to turn it on right from the start and make sure it worked. My mom told me she would be willing to pay for any accessories I needed (although I don't think she has any idea how much that would be, lol) so I went to CompUSA and decided to splurge for the Adaptec Firewire card instead of the brandless card they had on sale. Got that working and after a bit off difficulty, manged to get Ephpod to work. It wouldn't read my .mp4 files and I couldn't figure out how to change them to .m4a (XP was changing them to songtitle.m4a.mp4). So I ripped a quick mp3 to make sure the thing worked and listened to my first song, Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen Were Floating in Space. After hearing sound out of my iPod, I got to work and figured out the mp4 problem I was having.

I thought I had a crisis when it wouldn't turn on at one point in the afternoon. I guess I turned it off and if you turn it off,you have to reset it? Still haven't quite figured it out but I got it back up and running.

I must say I am very impressed with the sound quality (using AAC 128, encoded by Nero). It looks like I'm going to be ripping CDs for the next few months because encoding is really taxing my old P3 700. I'm just so happy to have it working and tomorrow I will order an iSkin and the necessary accessories to hardwire it to my car.