Cameron's Brain: iPod Day

It just goes to show you that persistence pays off. I rang about 10 Apple stores (and Apple telephone support) this week trying to get my hands on a 4G 40Gb iPod before I leave for Europe on Monday and nearly everyone told me the same thing - no chance in hell. They mostly said "they'll be another couple of weeks" but one guy said he might have some in this week and another guy took my details and said he would call me if anything came in. And it did. You beauty.

First impressions:

- DESIGN: Nice. Sleek. But you already know that.
- SPEED: the transfer of my 6000 tracks is SLOW. I've tried both firewire and USB 2.0 and they are both slower than I expected for some reason. Perhaps I'm being picky. I just looked at the transfer status and the tracks are moving over at about one per second. I guess that's okay. One and a half hours to transfer my entire music collection, not so big a deal.
- SOUND: no idea yet, still transferring tracks over. But I'm a little worried after reading this article at ipodlounge. UPDATE: I just stopped the transfer to listen to a few songs. Nice. The headphones I find comfortable enough so far and although they don't seem to have much bottom end, they sound pretty good. Lou Reed's rendition of "Ecstacy" from "Animal Serenade" still kicks ass. What about that guitar solo!! My ears bleed everytime I listen. Anyway, I digress.

The only other issue I'm facing with the iPod is the file sizes which I will worry about when I get back from Europe. When I imported my WMA files into iTunes and converted them to MP3, I set the bitrate to 192kbps to try to maintain the quality. However, the size of my music directory went from 21Gb to more like 30Gb. So I've already lost half of the extra hard drive I spent $650 on! I'll need to re-import them to a lower setting I think when I get back. Mind you, the import process took 48 hours non-stop the first time around and I don't know I could go through that again in this lifetime.