I had collected about 3.4gb of really diverse music on the ipod, and the shuffle function was really fun, and entertaining. But then it got corrupted and wouldn’t play anything, and I had to wipe it out and never tried to rebuild that collection. I can’t just sync to my hard drive, because I have a lot more than 4GB of music, much of it is not tagged, and a lot of it is tutorial music for my singing ventures. Besides, I had a lot of tunes collected on the ipod that are not on my hard drive at home. they are lost now. So now I just use the ipod for podcasts.

However, I’m not using itunes podcast functions because I’ve got another podcast manager with all my subscriptions set in it. So podcasts are loaded like music files. here’s the good and the bad:

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

IPOD GOOD
Great interface, really easy to use while running or driving;
4GB capacity;
It is cool;
Starts up podcasts where it left off (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT*)

That last one is the predominant reason I keep using the ipod. I have 4 other mp3 players, and 3 of them will not pick up in the middle of a partially listened file. They all start back at the beginning. And my 4th mp3 player has a short that causes one channel to cut in and out.

And because I can’t delete files on the ipod, I’m constantly writing little notes to myself of what I’ve listened to and what I haven’t so that I can delete the right the files when I eventually hook up to iTunes. That just sucks.

BTW, I don’t use playlists. I haven’t figured that out. Maybe that would help with some of my file management problems.

grumble grumble,
UB

Since I got my iPhone, I haven’t used my 80Gb iPod. It’s just more convenient to carry one device that does everything, even if I can’t fit my entire music & video collection on it.

I like VisualHub to convert videos for iPod & iPhone (it also supports PSP).