Christmas Gifts

I am finally the owner of an MP3 player. Mom and Dad gave me a ZenV for Christmas. It was the only one that didn't feel like over-conspicuous consumption to me. The iPod family just makes me wince when I look at the prices, and iTunes just infuriates me with their massively DRMed files. The ZenV are reasonably priced, with flash based memory, and the little buggers are tiny! I'd say about 1 1/2 by 2 inches. easily slipped into the coin pocket on a pair of Levis.

So I spent the afternoon moving my small existing mp3 library over to the new software that comes with the Zen, and cleaning it up. I tell you, we could use a little standardization on the genre tags. OK Go is Indie. Fountains of Wayne in Rock. And I've got no freaking idea what genre Emo represents (bizarre personality comedy? probably not). I consolidated a bunch of them, and spent a bunch of time on it. In the end, I think I'm going to use four genres, none very descriptive to outsiders.

1. The Girl's Music
2. Holiday Music
3. Curiosities
4. Other

The first three categories are a tool for removing stuff I don't want in my regular random playlists... like Hilary Duff, Mylie Cyrus, Auld Lang Syne, The Twelve Days of Christmas, or Louis Farakhan singing Calypso. Other is everything else. I'm guessing that'll be about it. Maybe I'll add a category for female jazz vocalists, but otherwise, I'm set. Now to start dumping CDs onto my hard drive. A long road ahead... a long road, indeed.