Every Flavour Beans

Yesterday I bought an Apple 30 GB iPod with Video Playback (Black) MP3 Player to use it as a 30GB USB drive(I have no intention to play music or video files on it). Here is the reason why.

I always prefer audio devices from Creative for their superior audio quality in general. When I ran through the reviews of most the popular MP3 players over the Internet more than a year back, most of them recommended Creative Zen Sleek 20 GB MP3 Player for better audio quality than the iPod. I eventually bought a Creative Zen Sleek as an MP3 player and Creative Zen Portable Media Center as a video player(which is an audio player too, but it’s a buggy product, so don’t go for it). When I later checked with one of my friend’s iPod player, I too found that the audio quality of Creative player was better, albeit marginally.

I also found some minor annoyances with the iPod player, some of which I would like to point out in the next blog post. But one area where iPod certainly scores over the other MP3 players is the ability to use all of the memory available in it as usual USB storage. The same feature is available in many other MP3 players, including my Creative Zen Sleek, but only iPod allowed me to convert all of 30GB available on the player as storage space for data files, and also providing with easy access to the stored files from both Windows and GNU/Linux operating systems – I just have to plug in the MP3 player and it is immediately recognised as a USB storage device in all the operating systems that I use. Creative Zen Sleek, for example, has a limitation on how much space can be used for storing the data files and for storing the music files, and it also has to be switched into a special mode if it is to be seen as a USB storage device by the operating system; irritatingly enough, it keeps crashing all the time in this special mode.

So why iPod? Why not a simple 30GB USB storage device? The secret here is that I have a relatively slow Internet connection at home where as the company in which one of my friends works has a very fast Internet connection. Most of this bandwidth goes unused every month and hence he can afford to download some of the personal stuff too on the office line. He needs to carry the downloaded stuff to his/my home in a removable media, but the company policy doesn’t allow carrying of any media inside of the working premises. End of the world? Fortunately, it is a common sight in the office to see many people carrying their MP3 players to their work desks and also plugging them into their computers to synchronise the music. Got you there! USB storage device disguised as an iPod MP3 player :) It is also very light weight, can be charged using a light-weight USB cable and is accessible from both Windows and GNU/Linux. It’s not too costly either. The only limitation(because of the underlying file system that it uses – FAT16) is that it can’t store files larger than ~4GB in size, but I’ll live with that :)