Posts are a bit slow recently – the new school term started, so that’s taking a fair bit of time, and I’ve been playing a little bit of Rhapsody and finding deep enjoyment in fighting enemies by summoning pancakes on them.

I also managed to justify buying a new digital audio player, because after all I’ve done so much work with the media library recently and we had some money that had been sent to us by assorted relatives around Christmas and all.

So: We have 61GB of music and I wanted to get something to hold it all, so that pretty much means a hard disk based player.  They’re pretty stable these days, after all, right?  We’ve had a Creative Zen Xtra 30GB model for six years now and a Zen Vision M 60GB for about 3 years – both are still chugging along just fine and work with Windows Media Player, so my obvious course of action was to go out and buy whatever their latest model is and be happy.

They, uh,

they don’t have a hard disk based player any more.

In fact, it doesn’t seem like anyone does a hard disk based player that doesn’t also try to be some kind of uber media tablet…

…except Microsoft and Apple…

…and the Zune, last I checked, doesn’t display kanji without serious hacking.

In quiet desperation, hopeful that I had overlooked an option, I went to Fry’s and wandered their portable music player section for a bit.  They had nothing that fit my parameters, and the salesperson that glommed on to us while we were browsing was a bit of an ass about hard disk players.

I will paraphrase-quote him: “They have moving parts, so they break.  You want flash, because it’s solid state.  That means it doesn’t have moving parts.  So it won’t break.  Because the parts don’t move.”

I thanked him for his insight.

Actually, I said it more or less exactly like “thank you for your insightful observation”, which was being a bit of a jerk, but look, the guy deserved it.  Even my dear wife, who normally tries to act as a buffer between me-as-jerk and the rest-of-the-world-that-doesn’t-deserve-me-to-be-a-jerk-to-them, admitted that I wasn’t completely out of line.

So I didn’t buy a player from them, but I did note that they had 120GB iPods on sale for $228.97.

We left Fry’s and decided to try to give our local Best Buy a try.

They also had absolutely no hard drive players except the iPod and the Zune.

I gave in and decided on the iPod.

I felt dirty about it, mind you.

Problem was, the iPod at Best Buy was $250.  Fry’s is only 10 minutes away, so it would have added a 20 minute round trip to go back there and save $21, which wasn’t in itself a problem, but it would have meant re-interacting with the hard-drive-players-break-because-they-have-moving-parts-guy.

I flagged down a blue-shirt and asked if they’d price match, and he made this the little sucking-air-in-through-his-teeth-noise that implied impending disappointment.

Then he said “Well…” in that way, you know, the heavy emphasis on the L sound, like “wellllllllllllll”, you know the way, and he directed me to the customer service desk to “see what they could do for me.”

It turned out that what they could do, and what they were quite gleeful to do, was call Fry’s, ask them if they had any 120GB iPods in stock, and ask them how much they were, then – in an equally gleeful fashion – sell me one for $228.

Anyway, iTunes is slowly importing all our music as I type this, and it looks like it’s going to take about four more hours.

It is worth noting, at this point, that I went into my access rights for the music folder and set myself to read only before I did this.  iTunes will NOT be screwing up my ID3 tags again.

I expect I’ll be happy with the iPod.  It’s got room to grow in to, it displays kanji and displays the album art I so painstakingly tracked down, but, seriously, Creative, thanks for totally dropping the ball when you killed your HD line.