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Crossposted to all the other places that shouted "get a mac" at me:
Last time I had a purchasing dilemma, lo, you spoke and I listened, and am now resolved to buy a 12-inch iBook the moment Tiger comes out. I asked for Linux recommendtions, and - hallelujah! - my spare PC is now ticking over like an open source beast. Come to me, my darlings, and help me once again to make an informed decision.
My needs are twofold. The first is that I think I probably need some form of capacious media player. This is as yet undetermined, but sitting on the plane back from Florence I realised that the 192MB of storage provided by my solid-state was a bit of a limiting factor, as was the incredibly irritating process of swapping tracks in and out of player and Compact Flash card, not to mention the limited run time provided by a single AA battery. Everything used to run on alkaline batteries, you know. None of this lithium nonsense. This may become less pressing when aforementioned iBook arrives, as my PDA can handle short hops (my standard model) - obviously, battery life being the main concern there.
Annnyway. That's issue the first. Issue the second is that I have a large, some would say silly large, collection of analogue media - magnetic tape and VCRs, primarily. It's occurred to me lately that, in order to hedge about actually getting rid of the books that actually take up most of the space in my flat, it might make sense to digitise these and dispose of/put in storage the originals. Now, the tapes can be digitised using my PC and Audacity or something to that effect, and get an analogue-to-digital video converter of the sort produced by dazzle for the videos. However, there are also media players out there, specifically the Archos AV series and the MSI Megaview 566, which can encode analogue input on the fly. Other than that, I don't think I'd have much use for a media player - books being the ultimate portable visual entertainment system for bus or train. I think I just like the idea of them - they seem so of the future.
So, would it make sense to amalgamate these functions in a media player, digitising straight from source using the player's software and then dumping it on my PC? Or to move the PC into the living room (which will have the added bonus of making Half-Life 2 impossible and make it my digital encoding girlfriend? Either way, what do you suggest I lay out for? Or is there a genius third option (beyond growing a pair and just throwing out or giving away products I have not listened to or watched for years), possibly involving Apple, as all good things apparently do? |
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