This post is mostly a response to my Uncle Bob’s recent comment on my recent post, entitled “iPod Classic.” He says (among other things) that:
IPOD BAD
Can’t uncorrupt database;
Can’t delete anything using ipod interface;
Must use Itunes to manage files;
Can’t read filenames in the ipod;
battery life about 4 hrs and diminishing
- My Uncle Bob, (my UB) who has had very bad luck with the iPod.
True, true. I know that the iPod has faults, all of them stemming from the closed-shut structure of it. The DRM’d music, the exclusivelity (not sure if that’s even a word) of iTunes, and various missing funcions like a mic, delete option, easy battery replacement, etc.
BUT… iPod still good!
It’s tight integration with iTunes has many advantages, generally being the ease that music is transferred from the iTunes store to iTunes to iPod to iTunes to CD and back.
The downside is that when iTunes goes wrong, iPod goes wrong. And when iPod goes wrong, music goes wrong. And when music goes wrong, it disappears. I sympathise very much with my UB but I feel he’s just gotten the short end of the stick (or something like that.) At the other end of the stick is an experience I had the other day with iTunes:
I was attempting to give my mac a new theme using a vareity of theme programs and somehow it interferred with iTunes. And made it not open. iTunes literally wouldn’t open, and I got an error about how there isn’t enough memory. Totally not true. As one would expect, I freaked out. I thought I was in big trouble.
But I fixed it! I deleted iTunes (just dragged the app into the trash) and reinstalled it from the internet. 1 minute later, I was re-setting up iTunes. It found all my music, playlists, ID3 tags, videos, star ratings, and podcast subscriptions automajically and everything was back to normal. I’m sure none of you really care, so I guess the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t try to download themes for your mac.
OK, beside that, I think that although iPod and iTunes isn’t perfect and it messes up a lot of the time, Apple has really put some thought into the features of their products; like resuming podcasts where you left off (as my UB mentioned,) the shuffle feature, (as my UB also mentined) and creating a file with all of your music library’s organization so you can do a clean install and keep all of your song info and playlists.
A typical snarky mac user would now say something about how if my UB had a mac, he wouldn’t have had this trouble (may or may not be true,) but I won’t because I’m nice. I will say that I’m very thankful I didn’t go through what my UB did.
I have no idea why I wrote this post. In reality I didn’t have much to say except quote my Uncle Bob, tell a boring story, and show off my amazing drawing skills when it comes to happy and sad faces.
It seems to be assumed that putting a CD onto an ipod (8GB nano, in my case) produces a near perfect result. My experience, and I guess that of others, is that this is not always the case. The faults fall into two categories:-
(a) A regular “ticking” accompanying the music. This tends to ocur towards the end of a CD. Since the CD plays from inside to outside (I think)this seems to occur when the CD is spinning faster (than it does on the inner “grooves”). Don’t know why this should happen but can’t think of any other reason!
(b) Irregular crunch noises or brief silences when the music is played on the ipod AND when the same music is played on the computer from the itunes library. I have re-imported the music from the CD, with and without cleaning it, to no avail. Looking closely at the CD reveals no obvious defects. I guess that importing the music from a CD into itunes is MUCH more sensitive to faults in the CD than simply playing the CD on a CD player. Certainly, when I play the “defective” CD on my CD player none of these faults can be heard.
Some of the CDs produce a perfect result but this seems not to be related to the age of the CD.
In fact, these kinds of problems are not new to me. I have similar problems when copying a CD onto a blank CD. Glitches are quite common, particularly towards the end of the CD. Glitches also occurred with Sony ATRAC compression for a Sony Walkman that I still have.
Glitch-free copying seems to be a so far unattainable Holy Grail!!