Putting my iPod to good use

Merv noted one day that I hardly used my iPod. I agreed, and he solved my problem with crappy radio songs in the car by getting for me that converter thing that you can hook up to your iPod, latch onto an FM station on the radio and presto! your collection on your iPod is all you need to put up with in you car, not irritating DJs nor crappy songs.

That device has transformed my mornings driving to work and the times that I spend in the car. Instead of cursing the radio DJs and their apparent lack of taste in music, I now curse my radio because it searches for radio stations and automatically stops when it gets a valid signal. I just can't seem to do a manual search, so it's no mean feat trying to latch onto an unoccupied frequency. The device works less than perfectly: the reach is less than what was advertised on the box and the overall sound quality is lacking. If the frequency gets stronger when I'm driving, the radio station latches on and overides my iPod. Somteimes it sounds like Switchfoot is trying to drown out Mawi, unsuccessfully. My iPod sounds like it's been broadcast over radio, but that's exactly what it's doing: broadcasting over the airwaves. I can't complain; I'm too simple-minded to bother about these things at the moment because I can now actually choose what I want to listen to without having to rip out anything from the existing audio setup in the car and pay RM3000 in the process. What did I expect from a RM150 device? I'm happy for now.

We've got a hodge podge of songs in that iPod; we've got stuff from Belle & Sebastian to Warrant to Pavarotti to Ruben Gonzalez to Klaus Badelt. So it stands to reason that, with my penchant for variety, my iPod is set on Shuffle most of the time. Half the time, my finger is on the forward icon because the iPod is spewing out Natascha Atlas when I really want to listen to Audioslave. However, I leave the shuffle setting on because I like not knowing what to expect; I like that the next song could be a piano lullaby from Hikare Oe or an eardrum blaster from Metallica. Either way, if I don't feel like it, I can always hit the forward button.

Among Rizal's and my collection of over 1,000 songs, my favourite of the lot belong to Peter Pan, an Indonesian band. I've been listening to their music more often than not when driving. I'd downloaded their music and uploaded them to the iPod. I don't remember why I don't have their albums like I do Sheila On 7, another Indonesian band.

The quality of the downloaded tunes leaves much to be desired and not wanting to have to listen to the substandard quality that I now have on my iPod, I bought two of their albums at Borders today: Bintang Di Syurga and Taman Langit. And then I realised that the iTunes on Rizal's PC is shot. It's not working and has not been working in the last couple of days. And that he's had problems reinstalling it because of something to do with Quicktime. It doesn't sound like something he can fix right away.

I'll have to content myself with listening to Peter Pan on the PC at home and putting up with the downloaded versions in the car. For the moment, I can kiss goodbye to my plans of blasting my favourite Peter Pan tune, Ku Katakan Dengan Indah in the car. Well, like I mentioned, I still have the downloaded version. In this case, a mediocre tune is better than none at all. Or putting up with the commercial junk on the radio.