I have to admit, when I first saw the Creative Xmod I thought it was just another gimmick. I thought to myself how you would take an existing file and make it sound better, let alone claim to make it sound “studio quality”. Compressed music takes a lot out of the music in order to achieve smaller file sizes. Compression has gotten a lot better over the years but even the best loss-less files result in about 50MB files for 4 minutes of music. Most compression such as MP3 and AAC formats use lossy compression, meaning you will compromise sound quality for smaller file size. I figured for $60 I would give the Creative Xmod a shot and see if it offers what it claims.

So I picked up a Phillips 7FF1M4 Digital Photo Frame on an impulse buy at my local Office Depot. I saw it on the shelf and I’ve always thought digital picture frames were a cool idea. Sure they are still pretty expensive. I picked this unit up for $200. The look of the frame is nice and it had enough memory to store pictures for a good slide show rotation.

When I picked up my Mac Mini Intel Core Solo, I handed my G4 Mac Mini to my mom. She has a Palm, a digital camera, a Canon printer, as well as a D-Link Bluetooth adapter to connect to the machine. Since the G4 Mac Mini only has two USB ports, once you add the keyboard and mouse, it only leaves one port on the keyboard and one on the back of the machine. I picked up a Belkin Hi-Speed USB 2.0 4-Port Hub at my local Comp USA for about $25 before a $10 mail in rebate. I figured I could probably order it online for cheaper, but the time it would take for me to wait for it was not worth the price difference. This hub would allow her to connect all her peripherals without needed to swap them in and out of the USB ports on the back of the machine.