Gadgets - Life made easier?????

Sometimes I wonder whether the latest hi-fi gadgets make us work more than making us work less. Isnt the computer industry supposed to reduce manual labour. But guess what, computer industry is the highest job provider here. May be there would have been more jobs if there werent computers. But still I think they had add more work on humans. Consider how I passed last weekend.
I have bought the new iPod and was trying to organize the songs for it. If I had been using the sony walkman cassette player, I would just have to buy a cassette and play it as and when i want to. But now there are lot of features in ipod that requires a lot of ground work before I can use it.

1. I had to download and install iTunes from the net first and have to choose the music folder so that my songs will be organised in appropriate folders automatically.


2. Then I had to download all the songs from the net to make justice to the large 30GB space I have in my ipod. I surely cant have just 10 songs of 50MB in such a huge space. It would be a great insult. So there I went on search of MP3 songs in the net. But guess what?


3. My internet connection was not working properly. So I had to troubleshoot it for few hours to make sure it works properly.


4. Then I realised that the download speed would be faster if I use star download manager. So I downloaded it from the net and installed it.


5. After downloading some 200 songs, I realised that the song titles, album and arist names were not correct in the downloaded songs. So I had to correct them in iTunes.


6. But my knowledge on music was very much limited that I had to rely on internet again to find the correct artists for each album. This task was the tedious one which took more than 4 hours to find about each and every song I have.


7. Phew! Atlast, I had all my songs with correct titles. But there is something more in iPod. You can view the artwork for the album you are listening to. I dont want to miss this good feature of iPod. So I went into the internet again to get the images for each album and add it to every song(I have a total of 809 songs) I have. This took another 3 hours.


8. When I thought that its all over, I found that all my songs have not taken more than 4 GB of space. With my iPod's hunger not satisfied, I decided to add some movies into it. And there we go again. Where can I find movies? iPod needs the movies to be in special format(.mp4).


9. So download the video convertor software and convert the movies which I have in .avi formats. Believe me. This is a very tedious task and I still havent got any proper software that can convert the video with proper audio-video syncronisation. They are always out of sync that sometimes I hear female voice when the hero is speaking to the heroine. Imagine what if the hero says to his wife "I am pregnant". That too in a lady's voice. The romantic movie would become a comedy movie.


10. I decided to download trailers from Apple instead and downloaded most of Apple advertisements from www.apple.com. It came up to 100MB only and I didnt want to work more on this.


11. Then there was this "Photos" section in iPod. Thats the section that I can fill easily. I have a total of 2333 photos so I can fill up atleast 1GB of space in my iPod.


12. So after a long time of collecting all music, movies and photos to fill my ipod, I copied them all to my hifi iPod which took about half an hour to copy into it.


13. So atlast, after 2 days of hard work and most of the internet bandwidth squeezed for the music, my iPod was all ready to rock my ears.

Was all these stuff worth it. Yes! It was worth every bit. The music turned out to be wonderful when heard in iPod. And the photos were very crisp and clear which I couldnt see in my laptop. My 2 days of hardwork didnt go in vain.

Moral of the story: hi-fi gadgets make you work more than before. But its all worthy when thinking of what more you get from it after your hard work.

PS: Now I need to download more movies and convert them into mp4 format. There is still more than 20GB of free space left in my iPod.