As a generally honest person, I am making an effort to legitimize my digital music collection over time. I've picked up a few MP3s at various places online (like Napster, back in the day), but was mostly drawn to it for the 'convenience' aspect, not so much for the 'free' side.
Anyway, I'll occasionally go through my collection in iTunes, find some tracks that I like and picked up online, and then see if they're in the iTunes store. If so, I'll buy them, or as I did recently, buy the whole associated albums. This has proven to be an incredibly good way to find new songs I like. Most of my illicit mp3s are "hit singles" from bands I'm otherwise not familiar with, so buying the whole album gives me a little more exposure to their music and this proved especially so with Everclear's "The Best of Everclear" (I'm partial to 'greatest hits' albums these days).
Some great songs on this album: "Wonderful" is the song I had before, but I really like "AM Radio", "Volvo Driving Soccer Mom", and "Sex With a Movie Star". They also do a decent cover of "Brown Eyed Girl" and a handful of other songs that are very listenable. I used to have an impression of Everclear as a band that ran a little heavier than my taste went, but I've been listening to this album for a week or so now and it's the best $12 I've spent recently.
I have written before about the experience of opening an iPod as compared with other music players -- in the context of the first impression with a new product. I just got a new iPod so I thought I'd post an update.
In my previous post (which I'm too lazy to go find right now), I drew the comparison between Apple's products and Creative's. In summary, Apple's packaging was so well designed and beautiful that a customer's first experience with the product was nearly joyful, while the first experience in opening a Creative player was having to hack through thick plastic to get at the device. When finished opening the Creative player, you were left with a pile of awkwardly shaped garbage that you had to throw away. When finished opening the iPod, all you had to toss was a bit of shrink wrap.
The new 5G iPod boxes are much smaller than the previous 3G boxes because you now get less stuff -- no dock or case, for example. The box itself is about the size of about four CD cases in a box set. Once the shrink wrap was off, the new box was a little harder to open than the old one -- it wasn't obvious how to actually get the thing open (it slides out of a 'sleeve', just like a box set of CDs would). In the end I figured it out, but not before I'd opened the 'wrong end'.
Once you've removed the box from the sleeve you break the seal and open the interior box, which folds out into two halves to reveal on the right hand side what looks like a photo of an iPod with the words "Don't steal music." on the screen. But it's not a photo, it's the iPod, which has a very flat surface and is packaged to be exactly flush with the rest of the packaging. Very nice to look at, but again, a little harder to get at.
The accessories are packaged in the left side of the box (there are icons for CD, USB and headphones on the top of the box to cue you to open it). The collection of stuff in there include a vinyl case (which looks far too small, but does fit -- very snugly -- because the new iPods are so thin), some CDs and a package of "wires". The "wires package is a sealed pouch, which is nicely notched for easy opening.
I won't cover the rest of the experience (like how Firewire's no longer supported), because I was mostly concerned with the packaging. Overall I'll give this "iPod opening experience" a score of 8/10. Still pretty good, but not quite as nice as the 3G iPod.