Downloaded.

With two little ones tucked safely into bed and the Mrs. snoozing comfortably on the couch, I guess I finally have the chance to drain a little music-oriented prose on my fellow RHT readers. While everyone in my house is dozing peacefully into the night I sit here at my computer with a notion to rant. So rant I will. The target of my angst tonight is our little friend the mp3. Now, before you techy-dweebs out there correct me on the proper "format" I should be referring to, let me stop you right there by saying - I don't care. They all suck. Can we just say it? I mean, I wish as much as you do that this was not so. I am one of the the few owners (emphasis on the word few) of a Microsoft Zune. In theory, this thing is awesome. 80 gig of memory allowing for the storing of hundreds, no thousands of music files. Just imagine (he says as his eyes flash back and forth in a giddy fashion), having all of your music library at your fingertips, stored ever-so compactly in your front shirt pocket!! Plus videos, pics, games and FM radio (this seems like a good time to do that noise Tim "The Tool Guy" Taylor used to do when he talked about his tools). But then, ahhh the reality.

So after spending the better part of one of my Christmas vacations diligently downloading album after album (I once stacked about fifty cd's beside the computer and ripped 'em in one setting, no kidding) into the gizmo - let the new life of musical convenience begin. Everything seems to be effortless - and if you were satisfied with audio quality on par with the audio on the old Bell & Howell reel-to-reel machine videos, then you are in heaven. Ok, the quality isn't that bad, but here is what is.

I'm listening to Eddie Money one day and right smack in the middle of "Two Tickets To Paradise" I get a 2 second replay of the guitar solo at the beginning of the song. Kinda, cut and paste style. That's weird. I'll just skip to something else, after all, I've got 'em all, right here. But it gets worse. Now when the album art comes up on the gizmo's screen, it says I'm listening to R.E.M. only to my surprise, the music is B-52's. (No it wasn't "Shiny Happy People" - just a coincidence). Kinda like that feeling you get when you think you are taking a drink of milk but then realize when you take the drink that its orange juice instead. But wait, there's more. For some reason, the track listing for my new Tom Petty album is in some type of cryptic code. Looks like digitized Chinese writing or something enscribed on a sword from Rohan. Yeah, but you can download free stuff on to that baby, you say. Sure, fire up 'ol Limewire twenty or thirty times. After you spend a month figuring out how to get the inadvertant song title "Girl has screaming orgasm" off your gizmo, and downloaded countless versions of "Superstition" before you get the one that was not recorded live for an Austrian bootleg, you'll wish you could just download a big worm virus and wipe the whole thing clean.

Accessories suck too. Sure, plug that FM transmitter into the bottom of the gizmo and you can play it through any stereo! Again, eyes aglow from the possibilities. Reality - FM transmitters can't transmit anything but crap and if you are trying to use it in your car's stereo they transmit even more crappier (I used that grammatical error to illustrate the crappy-ness). If you've never experienced this hook-up, just imagine me with a stereo playing it into a styrofoam cup that has a string attached to it that stretches to your cup a football field away. Now you have a grasp of the audio quality these transmitters achieve, that is when they are not broken up by static caused by cell phones, electricity, chewing gum and passing gas.

You see - as good as they look, and as great as we want them to be, they can't. We just aren't there yet. We don't realize it, but we are using the antiquated cell phone in a bag, right now. We're in Six Million Dollar Man stage and we need The Bionic Woman. Functionality and able to arouse all of your senses.

It's too much about what it can do than how it can play. Make it better and we will pay.

ps - ipods suck too.