Ah, the joy of First Come, First Served! I managed to be the third person today. I arrived about 15 minutes before opening, and already folks were waiting. And what’s more, some apparently had been & gone, but came back after we three hangers on arrived. I figured I’d just smile & nod a lot and if it looked like it was going to take a long time, I’d just schedule a time to get the thing installed. It turned out to not be a problem and I was officially third.

So, once I gave them my receipt, car key, and cell phone number, I headed in to shop around Best Buy. (I did no BB shopping yesterday other than the CD/MP3 player because I knew I’d have waiting time later.) I bought a couple of regular CDs – Heart’s Little Queen (cuz my favorite song, “Say Hello” has yet to be available for purchase by download) and Ricky Martin’s Almas Del Silencio. Nothing else really caught my fancy, so I bought the CDs and wandered around Big Lots before returning to the Mobile Install place at BB.

I sat & read more from The Princess Bride (my purse book) while I waited for them to finish and around 1pm, they gave me my key back, etc. On my way home, I played one of my MP3 CDs as a test, and found the balance was off. At first, I was afraid they’d hooked the front speakers to the rear jacks, but once I got home and checked out the manual, I found where to change the balance and have it pretty well sorted out. It’s really lovely – and best of all, it remembers the last song it was playing! Woohoo! (This has been my biggest annoyance with my other methods of playing MP3s in my car.) Best of all, when I turn off the car, the deck turns off too! (Yeah, of course it does, but when you’re used to using MP3 players and CD players separate, you have to turn them off when you’re done.)

So, now that I’m set with my car audio, I can sort out my in-house audio more. I’m thinking of maybe moving one Rio s10 into my reading room and move that MP3 player to the bedroom. Or something. As for my PC, I’m testing out MediaMonkey as my MP3 player/ripper/organizer. There are some features about it that I’m already loving. (It sits in my system tray and I can control play/pause/etc and see the current playlist just by right clicking on the little monkey.) I don’t care much for how it does Playlists (keeps ’em in a database rather than as separate .m3u files), but it works with my folder of pre-existing playlists just fine, so that’s good. (It can export to .m3u, apparently, though I haven’t tried that yet.) I gave up on MusicMatch for a few reasons. Mostly, they never pay attention to suggestions from us paying customers. (What’s worse is, back when I liked the program well enough, I paid for unlimited upgrades.) They’ve now got their online streaming audio service so entwined with their regular MP3 player that it’s annoying. If I want streaming music, I’ll stick with Rhapsody, thankyouverymuch. Oh yeah, and the latest version of MusicMatch doesn’t work with Winders98, so I’m screwed there.

I’m hoping that MediaMonkey will prove to be my player of choice. The things that it can’t do, I’m beginning to learn I can do without. So that’s a good thing.