2. Harley-Davidson MP3 Player

The Harley-Davidson MP3 player is quite well designed. It has just four buttons: power/play/pause, repeat one/repeat all/random/normal, skip/search forward, and skip/search backwards. This is a plus for safety, because it enables you to easily make a musical change without becoming distracted from riding the bike (or trike). The LCD shows the status and track number being played, but there is really no reason to look at it while riding.

The player came with a 64 MB Secure Digital Card (SD card) which will hold roughly an hour of CD stereo MP3 music encoded at 128 kbits per second. Fortunately, the cost of SD cards has dropped significantly, and I got a one gigabyte card from memorysuppliers.com for $99. The one gig card holds more than six hours of music - 356 tracks currently. I enjoy the random feature so there is a constant change of genre: opera, jazz, blues, rock, sacred, symphonic, baroque, country, etc.

Which Tracks To Choose? ITunes To The Rescue

Getting the music from my ThinkPad to the SD card was not as easy as it could have been. Most of my music tracks are mp3 that I created by ripping CDs that I had purchased over the years. The library contains roughly 5,000 tracks, while the SD card for the Harley MP3 player will hold roughly 350 tracks. Which ones to pick?

Enter Apple's iTunes, remarkably simple music software. You can play the entire library in sequence or in shuffle mode (random). You can play randomly by album or randomly across the entire collection - the latter is my favorite option because it results in a constant variety of selections. iTunes also makes it very simple to create playlists. Some of the playlists are basic, like the tracks most recently played, or those played most often. By using "smartlists", you can easily create much more sophisticated playlists. A smartlist might include randomly selected songs from your library that you have rated more than two stars out of five, have not been played for more than thirty days, are longer than 2 minutes and less than 7 minutes, exclude songs by Bon Jovi, and have an aggregate size for all songs in the smartlist less than one gigabyte. You could name the smartlist "Harley music".

There is no limit to how many playlists and smartlists you can have. The lists are stored in an xml file along with information about each track of music in the library. Everything is organized and tagged. The track information includes artist, album, track number, track name, length, when the track was last played, the rating you have given it, etc. and the playlist information includes a list of the track numbers from the library that are to be included. Brilliantly simple.

Now, how to get the actual tracks of music associated with the Harley playlist onto the SD card? iTunes is designed to work automatically with an iPod or iPod mini. The playlists of your choice (and that will fit) are always kept up to date on your iPod. If you make some changes to your playlist, the next time you connect your iPod to your PC, those changes are made in the iPod.

But for the Harley MP3 player, or any other player except an iPod, iTunes will not export the music. Enter Anapod from Red Chair Software . I knew there had to be a solution somewhere and I found it on ipodlounge.com. Anapod Explorer, "made by music lovers for music lovers" integrates your iPod into Windows using Explorer folders, right-click menus, and drag and drop. One right click and "copy to computer", and the music tracks were all transferred to the SD Card. Slip the card into the MP3 player and off I went for an iTrike ride with Mozart.