The U2 Special Edition for myself and the 20 gig 4th Generation iPod for Beautiful Wife. I have no idea if I’ll ever get around to buying the U2 Collection to make the additional cost make sense, but I do like the color…red, black and chrome. Has an oriental feel to it. Once Beautiful Wife finds out she can decorate hers with different colored stickers or sleeves…hers won’t stay the same color for more than a week anyways. Besides…since she’s got the cassette player in the minivan, she now has the better option for tunes because I bought her the adapter. Once I’m done, the van will be able to cruise with her entire library at our fingertips. That’s just cool.

Next project…get rid of all WMA files and Real Audio Files on my computer and convert re-download everything that’s not to a high quality MP3 Format that will work on all my toys. I was very ignorant of all this when I started putting music on my computer. I just sort of let Real Audio take care of this task and Windows Media take care of another and none of them ever got it all together. Since I can’t go back to work until next week at the very earliest, may as well finally get all my media files into one coherent library. That will be a first.

Oh…how do they sound? Better than I thought they would. They’re digital and clean sounding but there’s a richness…a depth to the sound that I simply wasn’t expecting.

One complaint. With the cost of these suckers they could at least print out the coherent owner’s manual for you. It comes on disk.

Carrying cases? Went with the nylon Case Logics vs the leather Belkins. I’ve never wore out a Case Logic product and I’ve had some of their stuff for over 10 years. They just keep going. Get ’em dirty? Throw ’em in the wash. Perhaps not as chique as some cases, but that’s okay, I’m not out to impress anyone but my ears.

Must go rip more music and load the hungry little rascals now. 20 gigs is a LOT of music and I know I won’t get them all filled up anytime soon but I do want my basics on there. And then Beautiful Wife will sit down and load hers up which will be different since she’s got some similar tastes, but not all.

Update: Get a carrying case of some sort ‘cuz damn…they scratch wayyyyyyyyy too easy. Doesn’t show so much on the white but on the black? It leaps right out at you. Just an aesthetic thing but…I’m nothing if not thorough.