If you're following the comments in your blog you'll notice that my wife (posting under the guise of MrsMEDC) drew attention to my deliberately vague use of the term MP3 Player.  As ever she keeps me honest ;-)

Well, there's no hiding the fact that I'm an iPod user, in fact we both are.  We both use iTunes - necessarily because otherwise we wouldn't be able to get any music to our iPods.  We share a library of music which lives on a shared server rather than waste space with duplicate files.  It turns out that sharing our huge - legitimately licensed - music library is something that doesn't appear to be too well supported in iTunes.  I'd love for iTunes to automatically scan the iTunes folder and add new songs but it doesn't do that.  Does it do that on Mac?  Is this a PC implementation limitation?  Anyone who knows any different please let me know! 
Keeping our libraries in sync - as accessed through iTunes - is complex.  We have to keep Copy Files to iTunes Library checked off and then rescan the WHOLE iTunes music folder which can take a while over a wireless LAN to add new tunes.  I'd love to just add the new album/album folders but the file structure of iTunes is somewhat illogical in that it spreads the tunes for a compilation over several folders, one for each artist represented.

Question : If we own one copy of a CD and we rip that CD to a single file and sync with two iPods for us to listen to ... is that within the concept of fair use?  Could a music company legitimately expect a married couple to buy two copies of a CD?  I'm thinking surely not.  Discuss?

Difficulty of sharing our music aside, we're both pretty happy with our iPods.  I bought my iPod after trying a number of other in market devices a couple of years back - most of them being flash based solutions.  For me and at that time, the iPod meant I could take a lot of music with me wherever I went without having to decide what I wanted to listen to before I left.  For someone like me who has very diverse music tastes, still likes listening to albums and who's musical mood changes every three seconds that's very important.  I'm thinking that when the battery in my iPod finally dies - and it's on its way out - I'm going to have to think about buying another player.  I guess I could always get the battery replaced.  Recommendations?

So my next point.  Locking into musical formats.  In many ways, I'm an old fashioned music consumer.  I still prefer to purchase CDs over digital music because I still have the high quality source (let's not get into a debate about whether CDs are a high quailty source - my hearing isn't THAT good).  If I have a high quality source  I can then rip that down to the format I want which is mostly based on the player I've got.  Currently, that means I have most of our music in 128kbps AAC format.  So some of you are asking the obvious question.  Why not use MP3 which is more portable?  Well, I CAN tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and AAC file so to get acceptable MP3 quality I have to go to 192kbps which means I lose 1/3 of the space on my device.  I have more music that I want to carry than I can fit on the device so I don't want to lose another third of it.

And that's why I keep buying CDs ... apart from the fun of going to record shops.  Because I'm insulated from the digital music standards war.  And when I eventually move to a WMA based player I'll just have to feed 600 CDs into my media PC to get the audio files in a new format.  People, transcoding between lossy formats doesn't cut it ...

I guess at SOME point tiny hard drives will be SOOOO cheap that someone will create a media player I can store all my music losslessly and portably.

My Alternate Solution : I don't mind purchasing CDs for $10 to $20, I really don't.  But once I've bought the music, as far as I'm concerned I've bought the right to use that CD on pretty much whatever player I want.  Media Center PC, PMC, iPod, my various laptops etc.  I realize music license holders and most music stores wouldn't necessarily agree with me but that's the way I feel.  So here's what I'd like.  A single, federated digital music source.  What do I mean?  When I purchase a CD, I've purchased the CD.  I'd like that purchase to be recognized by some music licensing system.  I'd then like to be able to request digital files from the system in formats of my choice for the various players I'd own over time without having to go ahead and feed CDs.  It can't be THAT hard ... ;-)