New Toy Acquisition

Creative Labs MuVo2

My wife finally decided that I should move out of the dark ages of vinyl LP's and CD's and into the 21st Century.

Recently, Fry's Electronics was running a special on the Creative Labs MuVo2 MP3 player. As far as microdrive MP3 players go, this thing was dirt cheap at $129. To make it an even sweeter deal, Creative Labs offered a $30 rebate to bring the price down to a mere $99. For a hundred bucks (plus state sales tax of 8.25%), I ended up with a pretty cool MP3 player with 4.0 GB hard drive capacity. While it might not be as cool looking as an iPod Mini or the Creative Labs Zen Micro, it's over a hundred bucks less and having an extra hundred bucks in the pocket is pretty damn cool!

The nice thing about this player is that it appears as a USB flash drive to most computer systems. That means I can connect it to my Linux box at home and easily move files to the player by dragging and dropping them into place. Recently, I set up a method to automatically capture and archive MP3 webcasts to disk using some open source tools and some simple shell scripts. I can listen to radio shows like the Byrd of Paradise's [b]Blues With Feeling[/b] or Steve Cushing's Blues Before Sunrise when it is convenient.

Last night, I loaded about 900 songs and a few three hour radio programs to this thing. This included most postwar 50's Chicago Blues worth listening to including a great deal of the Chess Records catalog. It's only about 75% full.

This has enabled a whole new way of listening to music for me. Life is good!