I use my mp3 player all the time. During workouts in the basement. I plug it into the stereo in my truck and listen on the road. I select a ’sounds of nature’ track like ‘thunderstorm’ and doze off for a nap. I use it at work on off-shifts to drown out background noise. I listen to it will riding my bike.

I don’t remember how I got along before buying it.

My taste is eclectic: Nat “King” Cole, Simon & Garfunkel, Rod Stewart’s Great American Songbook, Celtic music, the soundtrack to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I don’t always use it, just mostly when I ride BART. Although the first time I did it, I missed my stop because I wasn’t looking out the window!

If anyone has any recommendations for when I’m ready to buy a new computer, I’m all ears.

I also listen to it while grocery shopping for the same reason. And sometimes while doing heavy reading, to aid the concentration.

When I’m walking or running I want to hear the my own footsteps, my breathing, and the sounds of the world around me. When I’m reading I want to hear the words on the page being spoken inside my head. When I want to listen to music, I lay down on my bed, pop in the iPod, and just relax and focus on the notes, the sounds of the instruments, and the details of the singer’s voice. I pick the music apart too much to just have it playing in my head while I’m doing something else.

I use a sandisk player, only 512 mb, that is now only around 25 dollars. It has an fm radio and recorder. It has served me well up till now. I used it when traveling on the bus, or when doing data entry on a previous job (alternating music with the radio).

I am ready for an upgrade, but it will be a flash player, and probably around 2gb. Just enough to hold my favorites plus some data files and photos.

And what do I have on it now? A little of everyone. Some Nora Jones and Mark Knopfler. Some Keith Green and Cold Play. Some Soul Patrol, Leonard Cohen, Phil Keaggy and Alison Krauss. (Especially this cut from her album with Robert Plant). Even some classical choir music. It’s all mixed up.

Then too, I am one of those people who can listen to a song I like over and over for a half hour straight, so that 512 mb can goes a long way.

Hearing the everyday noises of life is an education to me, something that changes by the moment, and I don’t want to pre-empt any potential encounters that God may have planned just because I have “deafeners” in.

In the car, the old AM/FM radio usually does the trick

If I go into Bloomingdales and hear jarring hip-hop….you know that there’s a problem. Look at the noise pollution these days….and the majority of it coming from people who want our money !

If they can’t figure out the proper music to set the mood, then I’m not shopping in their store !

I’ll just put on my own tasteful elevator classics, and shop with E-bay !

I use mine to listen to sermons and lectures while I walk, cook, do various things.

I use instrumental music as “white noise” when I’m needing to read somewhere amid audio distractions.

I will say that one of the greatly under-appreciated new inventions is the AppleTV. We have one and it networks our regular television to our computers so we can play anything on our iTunes on our TV over our home network. Doesn’t seem like such a big deal until you have a few movies (and possibly a DVD player) destroyed by a very curious toddler! Digital media is virtually indestructible!