Great new gift to myself

[thelerner]

In the past 4 years I've had an Ipod, I've gone through 8 or 10 pair of earphones, breaking half of them when I held them in my pocket. I've never found a small pair that felt good. Course I always bought cheapish ones.

 

I just bought the Bose Inears. Very impressive, great comfort and they stay in the ear well. The sound is better then my over the ear models. They offer only moderate sound proofing, which will probably keep a few people alive.

 

It was between these or the Shure's which were $99 to $379. I can really recommend these.

 

Went to Virgin Mega store. Picked up Rush Radio classics. Can't wait to load it in

 

Michael

[Smile]

MaximumPC tested in-ear headphones in October. They recommend

 

Etymotic ER-6 Isolator and Creative Zen Aurvana

 

They tested Bose headphones (Bose put up ads for them all over NYC) and didn't like the quality for the price compared with the above 2.

 

The other people recommend Shure e4g.

Way too much money.

 

Read also this report.

[TwoTrees]

I liked the Bose inear headphones as well. The soft rubbery lining that goes in the ears is very non-evasive and comfortable. As long as you are not jamming out totally it shouldn't damage your lobular vesicules.

 

Picked up the Rush classics, eh, you don't waste any time

 

Why don't you try some Dream Theater or Savatage, if you think about it sometime in the future ?

You will not regret it.

[thelerner]

Problem is few places will allow you to test in ear head phones. A Bose store will and if you can get there attention, Apple stores will let you test the Shures. I was able to try some of the others, but there noise isolation made them less comfortable then the Bose.

 

Ultimately I may have picked comfort over sound. But its a big difference from the pairs I've been using.

 

With new head phones has come new music . Now I've running out of room on my 4 gig Ipod.

 

 

Michael

[Trunk]

I just bought an ipod nano last weekend. Convenient, though I'm still figuring out how to organize the files with playlists & folders. I bought one of those gizmos to have it play over the fm in my car.

 

In addition to harmonica lessons and learning monty python songs, I have an eye out to put dharma talks on the pod. If anyone has any good links to sites with downloadable talks, that'd be helpful.

[rex]

In addition to harmonica lessons and learning monty python songs, I have an eye out to put dharma talks on the pod. If anyone has any good links to sites with downloadable talks, that'd be helpful.

Courtesy of e-sangha:

 

http://www.lamrim.com/index2.html

http://www.dharma-media.org/media/index.php

http://www.mahabodhi.org/talks_mp3.htm

http://www.kalachakra.com/home/index.html

http://mangalashribhuti.cleverspin.com/MSB_PL/list.php

http://phayul.com/onlineradio/ltwa.aspx

http://www.kunkyab.org/

http://www.buddhistmedia.com/default.asp?lang=eng

[thelerner]

Cool free stuff. The Center of Stillness Meditation(CSM) and Archaeous series, free at Bardoncompanion.com. Great meditation series inspired by Franz Bardon.

 

Check out many of the podcasts at the Itunes store. I auto download from the Infinitesmile.com, Zen inspired talks of Michael McAllistair. There are a few others I'll record on case by case basis. There other many gems you can find on podcasts. Heck type in harmonica, you may be pleasantly surprised.

 

The library is an awesome source to feed the Pod. Not just 1,000+ CD's. Hundreds of stories and lesson CD's.

 

I've heard people have a way to record off of Pandora.com. That would be an ideal way to fill an Ipod with song styles you like. I'm not sure how to do it though.

 

Enjoy,

[Smile]

Wow, Pandora is so cool. You type the group you like and they give you same style groups- what a cool way to discover new music...

 

Here is the instructions how to get mp3 from Pandora:

 

1. Go to pandora.com and setup an account.

2. Download and run Pandora's Jar. This forum post has the latest installations.

3. Click the Extract All Files link to uncompress the files to a directory on your computer. I use c:\pandora

4. Goto the directory that contains your downloaded files (c:\pandora)

5. Double-click on pandora.jar.

6. The file will launch and you will see something like:

 

Welcome to Pandoras Jar

Attempting to lauch on port 80...OK

[ready, lets grab some MP3'S!!!]

7. Visit http://localhost in firefox

8. Firefox should load with Pandoras Jar version of Pandora

9. As you listen, the mp3s will be created in a directory called mp3 in your original pandoras jar installation directory (c:\pandora\mp3)

[thelerner]

Cool, I'll have to try it.

 

Michael

[Trunk]

I found a discussion section about audiobooks at "iPod Forums at iLounge". The stickies are really helpful in learning how to deal with audiobooks. Basically, a file has to be of a certain type (m4b) in order for the ipod to recognize it as an audiobook (audiobooks are bookmarkable and don't play in main menu shuffles), and there is a 3rd party program, "markable", that does the conversion for you. It's important for me, cause a lot of what I want the ipod for is lectures & learning, but I still want to play music.

 

-- later edit --

I've been f'ing around with "markable" etc, too complicated and messy - just decided to skip that and use the regular iTunes import for lectures etc and then mark the files as "skip during shuffle" and "mark the last place".

[Smile]

I got Iriver Clix because I needed a recorder for my Mandarin classes. Not so bad and it can play mpeg-4 videos as well, plus view text files (I have a PDF to txt converter).

[Lozen]

Diamond Mountain has a ton of talks, you just have to dig around. diamondmtn.org