Don't Ever Tell Locke What He Can't Do

...is the name of the first track on the new Moneen CD, and if you're in with the cool kids you probably recognized it right away as a reference to the show Lost, which I'm known to watch on occasion. You know: Every goddamn week, as soon as I can.

Before I say anthing else: Any thoughts on MP3 players for me? I'll explain in a second.

That said I had a few things to say about Audio. Yesterday I picked up Moneen and the new Punchline, both are good. Best Buy has a bunch of decent CD's for $7.99 right now, the latter being one of them (Fuck-the Moneen disc is only $6 for some reason anyway), and I acquired a lot of CD's through... other... means over the past couple of days too. Bands involved:

The Magic Numbers
Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah!
Saves the Day
The Strokes
The Kooks
Built to Spill (actually I bought that one fair and square)
Belle and Sebastian
We Are Scientists
Tapes 'n Tapes
Band of Horses
Secret Machines
Surfjan Stevens
The Sounds
Brand New (Demo's - OK and I wouldn't expect more, they're rough demo tracks)
Feist
Dresden Dolls
The Liars
Mew
The Concretes
Minus The Bear
Motion City Soundtrack
The Editors
Calexico

...you get the idea. I started burning all of these to CD so I could listen to them via my $10 Portable CD Player that I use when I drive to work because I don't have an actual deck installed in my car, when the idea of an MP3 player started to really strike me as a good idea for the first time. My Cell Phone plays MP3's and can hold 512 MB worth, but that's the ONLY form of MP3 Player I've ever had. And with my tax return on the way...

Well I've been looking at these two: the Cowon iAudio X5 60GB Black and the tried-n'-true Apple 60GB iPod. The latter I probably get a bit of a discount on at Best Buy, but the former is really catching my eye. They're both 60GB, they're both around $400, they both support video. The iAudio plays FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files, and in general supports more file formats than the iPod. FLAC is an extremely high bit-rate file format that you can sometimes find Studio work or concerts recorded in. The file size is bigger than MP3 but the quality differnce is noticable. Ogg Vorbis is a format that's been around for a while but hasn't really caught on yet, it's more compact than MP3 and you lose less data so the quality stays truer to the CD's. The iPod is namebrand and supports online things like iTunes, but really that's all it has going for it between the two.

So: Anyone have any other suggestions, or thoughts on these two? They're both pretty heavy-hitters.