Re Karen’s 2000-CD music collection–I’ve got my eye on the sweet new RCA RD2840 Lyra Personal Jukebox MP3 Player. For just $299 (price sure to drop soon), you get a walkman-sized 40GB MP3 player. That’s enough to hold about 1200 CD’s worth of music–! A competitor is the Archos 20GB Jukebox, which might be preferable if it came in larger capacity, as it probably will any day now.
With one of these babies, you can rip your entire CD collection (unless you’re a fanatic like Karen with 2000) to your hard drive, then store it on the handheld player, with tons of your own playlists. Attach it to a wireless adapter and you can play the songs on any stereo with an FM radio receiver within 10 to 30 feet. Going on a road trip? Don’t take 10 to 20 CDs along… take your entire CD music library, in the palm of your hand.
[Followup: Karen De Coster reminded me of the Apple iPod, for which she has a preference over the others. And apparently it now comes in a 40GB model, too–but at $499, much more expensive than the RCA Lyra and Archos devices. In addition, I’ve always hated Macintosh and Macintosh fans, and devices designed to “make it easy” for techno-illiterates–usually it doesn’t, it only restricts your ability to find a fix when the inevitable bugs occur.
Second followup: comments from readers who use the new generation of Macs lead me to wonder if maybe it’s worth switching and joining the cult. What can be worse than the continual crashes that Windows users face?]
P.s.: who the heck is Julie London? Link, clue, description? Little help, man.
2:02 am on September 29, 2003
