I finally bought another iPod to replace my first gen one. I was kinda waiting for the widescreen one, but after giving it some thought, I wouldn’t want to watch movies on a 3-4″ display.

The first one I owned never had a case on it, and it has tons of scratches on it. I didn’t want this to happen on my new black iPod, so I knew I had to buy some sort of case to protect the new shiny toy. I ended up buying an Invisible Shield, from ShieldZone. SchwarzTech has a good review of the product here. Putting the pieces on the device was a pain in the ass. It took me around an hour to put it all on, and it still wasn’t perfect. But after a few weeks of use, I am happy with the purchase.

I knew I didn’t want to use iTunes, because it forces you to have your music library in one place. I have a ton of albums, mixes, etc. and they are all on different hard drives. I used EphPod with my first gen iPod, but they haven’t updated the software to be compatible with the latest models. Anapod Explorer seems to fit in where EphPod left off, but it did cost me some money. The software isn’t 100% compatible, because I found a bug in the tracklist generation. When using the alarm clock, if you generated a playlist with Anapod, it will not play anything when waking up. If you generate a playlist in iTunes, the alarm clock works fine. There are some other bugs with playlists in Anapod, but I am still tracking down the specific reason for them.

Because I travel often, I also purchased Altec Lansing’s IM3 portable speakers. I was afraid the iPod with the Invisible Shield wouldn’t fit on the dock, but it fits fine. The unit can be powered via AC or batteries.