not grand, bland
Apple
The Sounds of OS X
Yesterday I got my iPod, which completely rocks. How cool is it to have basically your entire music collection (the parts worth listening to, at least), in your hand? Then I found out about Wire Tap, a free utility which saves to your hard drive any audio playing on your Mac, whether it’s a song, news program or speech on C-SPAN. You can transfer the resulting AIFF file to your iPod. Then, today I saw Todd Dominey mention Detour, an app that allows you to set sound preferences for each application. Two days, two useful and cheap programs that I can and will use.
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© 2003 this is blandiose.org. 
Are you satisfied with the audio quality of MP3s? They can be made to sound good but the files are huge to get decent quality. 192kb rips are good and that makes for a 7 meg MP3 for a 5-6 min song. That may be the standard now and I stand corrected if so. (please forgive my ignorance of present norms…the early MP3s sounded like hell to me and I never pursued the medium seriously in the Napster days nor since.)
I am just debating to myself if I should get an iPod along with my new PowerMac G5 that I have pre-ordered. I want one but I am not sure it is worth the money.
I have to say that I’ve been listening to mp3s for awhile now and I am pretty satisfied with the sound quality. Now, I don’t have much audio equipment in general at home, so perhaps my ear isn’t as sensitive as the next guy. I can live with 128kb rips myself, but yeah, the 192kb probably are better. And heck, even at 7 megs a song, I have a good bit of room on a 20-gig iPod. As for Paul’s question, I think it has been worth it just from the standpoint of having my entire music collection at my fingertips whenever I want it. Not to mention the ability, using OS X’s Text-to-Speech app, to take documents and “record” them for transferring to the iPod so I can listen to them while going to work, etc. Lots of possibilities.