A wee bit of tech support, anybody?
The story so far…a year or so back my kind brother-in-law passed down an iPod Touch, which I’ve slowly learned to use, and employ principally (a) to torture the nice kids who work at the coffee shop in the Baptist Student Union where I am the titular manager and (b) to listen through and sequence the prerecorded radio show I should be prerecording instead of typing.
Turns out my wife still likes to listen to music, some nights, and the iPod is a handy way to do that, easier than me dragging CDs from the back office to the front of the house, and forgetting to put them away. Or letting Maggie loose with them. Or whatever.
But the sound quality on the little portable docking station the same brother-in-law gave me for Christmas is, well, not really much different from the AM radio my brother took apart and stapled to a piece of plywood back in 1963, I guess, when I heard “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” played back through his 1.5-inch speaker. Or was it “8 Days A Week.” Oh, well. I digress. The sound quality’s pretty marginal. Adequate for folding clothes, and that’s about it.
Now…I’m not really into spending more money on stereo equipment. We have two full component systems here — good, but not high end stuff — and I have still not figured out what to do with the set of Advent loudspeakers back in the storage room underneath all the back issues of ND, though I keep threatening to hook them up here in the office and really get loud. When nobody’s home, of course. I’m a kind man, willing to inflict my musical tastes only on strangers.
So I’m not really keen on buying a high-end docking station. Nor do I have the money. But I have read online that there are simple plugs which can run from my iPod into the auxiliary slot on the stereo. Only the reviews are a little mixed, and I have a sense that there’s not enough power in the iPod to drive the stereo? Or is the signal too degraded? Or are the cables just not very good quality? Or…what.
So that’s one problem.
Then the other one, a more long-range issue, is that I am no longer current on what kind of hard drive storage is now in the marketplace, nor, exactly, how to move songs and albums and what not from my main hard drive onto a secondary disc. (We’re talking Mac here, and I’m one operating system behind at the moment.) And, really, how do I move it without taking stuff OUT of iTunes? Or do I drop all of iTunes onto a second drive?
So I’m looking for counsel, since about everybody here is vastly more technologically adept than I am, or choose to admit in public.
Signed…your faithful luddite, descendant of illiterate Irish weavers, none of whom can carry a tune. More’s the pity. But I began digressing again. Sorry.