By Alicia Guidry

iPods are great! What more can I say? If you don’t have one yet, you just don’t know what you’re missing out on. I didn’t either.

I actually have the very first, original iPod that was manufactured. I just had to have it. My own personal reasons were that I travel in the car a lot and wanted to listen to my Coast To Coast radio shows that I never get to listen to at home.

Now, I’ve actually been on a Mac for over 10 years, but the company laptop is of course a PC. I was really anticipating problems with the conversion, what with that entire Mac to PC stuff. To my surprise, all I did was download iTunes for the PC and drag and drop my folders of the shows into iTunes. Then I just hooked up the iPod to the PC and downloaded the shows to the iPod. Was I shocked or what?

After awhile, I got a bit bored with all the shows and wanted some variety. Sure, I could rip my own CD’s and transfer those to the iPod, but I also wanted some audio books to listen to on those 7 hour drives. That’s when I discovered how cheap it is to legally download everything I could ever want and transfer it to my iPod.

I was also given the new iPod Photo for a birthday gift. At first, I thought it was simply for loading photos. Then, I didn’t think I’d watch music videos but I was interested in watching movies in my downtime. I just wasn’t sure where to get them and how to do it.

I used the Apple store at first to download some videos but I have to tell you, that decision ate right through my pocketbook. What Apple does is charge you per download and in the end, you’re basically paying retail for everything. You have to buy a la carte.

I then read review after review on download services. I had read about people downloading malware and viruses in addition to having extremely slow download speeds, even with a broadband connection. I then ran across a review by Top Service Review that rated the top three iPod download services and I ended up joining the Editors Pick.

What I’ve gotten with an iPod download service is simply this:

I paid a small fee that’s good for lifetime, unlimited access! Not monthly, not per download, but forever…I can log in anytime of day or night, 365 days per year and download movies (some that have just hit the theatres), music, videos, television show episodes, audio books, music videos and sporting events. Included in the deal, I also got all the conversion and ripping software to convert the DVD movies and transfer them to my iPod along with tons of video and audio tutorials.

In a nutshell, I’ve got so much stuff; I can’t fit it all in my iPod. It just sits here and waits for its turn.

You really want to be careful about the service you sign up for; many of them claim to have unlimited access and it’s not. Others claim fast download speeds but their servers are jam-packed and you’d think you were on dial-up. Others download malicious code onto your computer for their own insane reasons. I personally went with a particular site that I post on my blog because the rating and reviews were all 5 Star. I haven’t been sorry to date.

Even if you have an iPod Mini or an iPod nano and can’t watch movies and television shows on your iPod, you can still rack up on music, audio books and audio feeds, since they offer well over 95,000,000 media files. Let’s put it this way, it’s still cheaper than two DVD’s. I sure am glad I got the 60GB iPod!

Alicia Guidry is the owner of: iPod Downloads

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