iThink, Therefore iShuffle

I’m making the somewhat painful transition from Windows Media Player to iTunes. “Somewhat painful” because I’m so used to the speed in which WMP can rip music from a CD. iTunes takes more than twice that speed to import music from CDs. I hope I could load a lot of songs into my computer because I plan to get me an iShuffle.

There, I’ve said it.

My recent road trips during Holy Week have made one thing painfully clear to me: Orlando’s cassette deck had become inadequate for my wants. Not needs, mind you, but wants. Now I want a digital source for my music while driving Orly.

Truth is it’s still somewhat a toss up between a mini iPod or an iShuffle. In terms of memory size, I only need an iShuffle. But the mini iPod allows me more choices in the order of listening to songs. What if I want to shift from Enya’s ethereal sounds to New Order’s hard-driving techno? In the iShuffle I’d be pressing the skip button blindly until I reach a New Order song. But I think the difference in cost between the Shuffle and the Pod will be enough for me to embrace the former.

The option to buy a non-Apple MP3 player is there, but because they don’t have the cool factor of Apple, I’m not really exploring that option seriously. (Yes, they’re cheaper. Not cool at all.)

So now I’m enduring the longer process of importing songs in iTunes, sometimes enduring the pauses and lags during the process. (I have no idea why they happen. Argh!) It’ll be days before I can sufficiently fill my iTunes with enough songs to fill an iShuffle.

I’m counting my tracks before they’re shuffled.