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April 4, 2005
Uncle : Apple!
I have posted before my disgust with the Apple iPod juggernaut. Two weeks ago, I crumbled under the unrelenting pressure. I bought Alex (my wife) an iPod Mini. A nice cute, pink one. With an iscription on the back for our anniversary. Her two year old (and four times as large) Rio Riot just stopped turning on one day (switch broke). Alex only had about 2gig of music on the thing anyway and never used the radio feature (although I did). She wanted something much smaller that she could run with. And wanted it dead simple. Despite my personal misgivings, the iPod was the natural choice for my non-technical wife.
When the package arrived, the OOBE was very good. Super pleasing packaging. Easy software install. Immediate hardware recognition. But first problems came when I tried to get iTunes to recognize the vast song library up on my RAID server. iTunes is obviously only designed for local use. With the default settings, iTunes tried to import (copy) all the music from the RAID to the local (20gig) hard drive and soon ran out of space. IT took some hunting for the right settings to tell iTunes to just leave the music where it was. Then once it started, I had to stop it (it had taken over an hour) and then re-start it. The re-start left me with many duplicate song entries and no clear way to remove them. Then came picking the songs to move to the 6gig ipod from the 100gig archive. IT is nonobvious how to do this and Apple Help is no help. After a browse of the bulletin boards and a couple calls to other iPod users, I figured out to create a "playlist" and then drag/drop the music you want there and tell iTunes to keep the iPod synced with that playlist. Ok, fine, now I want to open two windows side by side (like you can in any Windows application) and drag/drop between them. No can do with iTunes. You have only one active window at a time and can't run two instances of the program. STUPID! So you have to view the library window and drag/drop the files from there onto the iTunes playlist. But you can't check the progress of that playlist or see the files in it as you go.
Well two days later (and me doing all the work), Alex has an ipod with her favorite music and is using it for work-out. But I noticed the thing tucked into her shorts this morning instead of in the holster (too much stuff for her). I got the Griffin iTrip, but haven't wandered down that road with the car yet. Alex says all she wants it for is to work-out and doesn't want that music in the car. One thing a friend does with his i-pod is record him reading books to his children at night. Sounds fun. But Oh, No, the iPod Mini's firmware doesn't support recording so no mics are made. You have to buy a different iPod for that. Like I said before, Apple you are BLOWING a great platform opportunity by creating forced incompatibility between your product lines.
Posted by Martin at April 4, 2005 9:34 PM
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Comments
A couple of notes: When you plug in the iPod it should show up in your playlists list on the left of the window. You don't strictly speaking need a playlist — you can drag music over from the Library playlist to the iPod icon, and it will be transferred in the background.
Also, you can open a new iTunes window by double-clicking the icon next to the playlist name.
My pet peeve is not being able to pull music off the iPod in iTunes. Nor can you re-download music purchased from the iTMS without paying for it again (or using PyMusique). This means I have to devote half of my iBook's 30G hard drive to backing up my music. But I guess Apple has to throw in a few silly "speedbumps" to placate Hollywood.
The voice recorder thing is another stupidity. Even on the full-size iPod, you can't record at a quality anywhere near what the hardware supports.
(I've got a 15G 3rd gen iPod myself, and coincidentally bought an engraved pink iPod mini as an anniversary gift last year).
Posted by: frank.dawg 
at April 5, 2005 11:41 AM
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