I can't remember the last time I had this big of a case of UPS jitters. No, I don't have my tongue hooked up to the electrodes of the battery of my Uninterruptable Power Supply... I am waiting for "the man in brown" to show up at my door with a parcel. Everytime I hear a rumble or a screech my head cranes to look out the window to see if I see one of these parked at my curb.
Future Shop was running a special on the Rio Fuse. It was a price I couldn't pass up so I ordered one. Sure it's only 128 megs, but after looking at my music collection and knowing the lengths of intervals that I am away from a computer, I knew that wouldn't be a big issue.
Last night as the jitters began to take hold and the excitement began to build, I went to the Rio Audio site and downloaded the quick start card and manual in PDF format to read over, and I must say I'm quite excited.
The unit is essentially a USB thumb drive with an onboard MP3/WMA decoder. So I can use it to schlep files around too in a pinch.
Most of you know that I am an iTunes for Windows user. Matt (aka George) got me hooked on it and I haven't looked back. The manual mentioned using their own software - Rio Music Manager - or Real Jukebox for Windows users. The Rio Software wasn't too bad - I downloaded it and took a look. I won't touch a Real product with a 100 foot pole. Then I flipped a few pages to the Mac section and found that they suggest using iTunes for Mac users. Hmmmm. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky? You know it's gonna be the first thing I try.
I could always just copy the files using Windows explorer to the device, but using Smart Playlists in iTunes is just sooooooooooooo much easier. I can tell it to make a playlist where genre is "Rock", rating is at least three stars, and limit the playlist to 128 megabytes of music. How sweet is that? It automatically goes through my library and makes a playlist I can (in theory) drag and drop to the Fuse. AND - I discovered - I can recycle the playlist parameters/criteria by checking the "Live Update" box, and then just going to the playlist and deleting all the entries. Took me a while to figure that out, but oh what a wonderful piece of software.
(Incidentally, we've all seen those mp3 ads where they tell you "about" how many files you can fit on a certain amount of memory. In real life tests, iTunes fit 22-24 songs and about an hour and a half of music on 128 megs and most of my music is 192k mp3's.)
Today should be fun.
Posted by netnomad at April 13, 2004 09:06 AM