After almost two years of frequently infuriating service, I finally quit on my Creative Zen Touch 40gb mp3 player. Both the hardware and software aspects of the player had become torturous in recent months.

The Zen Touch worked fairly well for its first year of existence, exhibiting only a few oddities—freezing, splicing bits of other songs into the current selection—that could be fixed by inserting a paper clip to hit the reset button. After an unfortunate drop last winter, such instances increased tenfold, while the booting up / shutting down process became treacherous. Slightly bent paper clips litter my apartment, car, bags, office, etc. I could tell the hard drive was on its way out, and I had ample evidence for this prognostication.

I had picked up a 5gb Creative Zen Micro for my wife a few months after I picked up my Zen Touch, and that player lasted even less time, first succumbing to a fairly common faulty headphone jack, a problem I was able to fix, and then capitulating to a dead hard drive. We hadn’t even dropped this one, but of course, the Zen Touch had the extended warranty and the Zen Micro’s warranty had just ran out.

Adding insult to injury, the Zen Touch had major issues with my old laptop (foremost: refusing to connect to it), so I made a huge mistake by updating the firmware to the PlaysForSure standard. This move caused issues with Notmad Manager, the excellent third-party software that I purchased to replace Creative’s wretched bundled software, thereby forcing me to sync new songs with, God forbid, Windows Media Player. I blame my wonky player, not Notmad in this case.

In the interest of conceivable longevity, I decided to give up on hard drive–based mp3 players for the time being and switch over to the highest capacity flash-based player, the new 8gb iPod Nano. My contentious relationship with the Zen Touch aside, I would greatly prefer to have a large capacity player, but I just couldn’t stomach the idea of owning another clicking brick in thirteen months.

I’ve heard my share of iPod-related grumbling, but I secretly hoped to avoid unwieldy hardware problems and frowning images of doom. Well. It took all of one day before I had to exchange said Nano at Best Buy. A high-pitched whine threatened to drive me slowly insane or, at the very least, give me a consistent headache. The exchange process was easy enough and I suppose I’d rather deal with this sort of issue now rather than in thirteen months.

The player itself—the new, quiet one—is admittedly a fairly astonishing piece of machinery. You’ve seen them. They’re tiny. Mine’s black. It has solitaire on it.

I had never installed iTunes before, hating the idea of a resource-hogging library system, but I succumbed to its wily charms in order to get music onto said player. Sorry Winamp. (If anyone has any experience with Anapod, Red Chair Software’s iPod equivalent of Notmad, please comment.) I enjoy the album artwork and the album-sorted view, but only 50% of the albums automatically downloaded the covers and two of the albums split their tracks into multiple album entries.

As for the actual music making it onto the player, cutting back on 24 gigs of music was a tricky task. I still have a few hundred megs to fill, but the primary casualty so far has been having multiple albums from a single artists. I already have a tendency to create best-of compilations for my favorite artists (so far: Mogwai, Archers of Loaf, Polvo, Silkworm, Pavement), so this situation could easily get out of hand.