ipods suck. Yeah, I said it!
May 17th 2008 08:28
The ipod is my natural enemy
Why you ask? Why is this woman blaspheming against music?
Let me tell you a few facts about the ipod and itunes.
Itunes has no automatic sensor of doubles. So if you accidentally add a CD twice, it won’t prompt you AS DOES ANY OTHER PIECE OF SOFTWARE IN THE WORLD warning you that you’re about to make doubles, it just goes ahead and adds it twice. And then when you try and get rid of those doubles by selecting the show all duplicates button, it doesn’t just show you the duplicates, it shows you the original too so you have to go through one by one deleting a track.
The duplicates button also fails to see that songs with the same name, but by different artists are in fact different songs. It also doesn’t recognise that songs on different albums, like say a live album, are also different songs. I cannot get over the idiocy of this. This may not seem like a big deal, but if you’re into cover songs, or have a lot of live music, you’re essentially boned.
Unlike windows media player, itunes also seems to have a big issue with finding cover art. You can’t just say- go find cover art little itunes, there’s a good boy, there’ll be a treat for you at the end. Because the program is too dumb. It seems to find, instead of say the cover art for David Bowie’s Hunky Dory album, an obscure movie soundtrack the Bowie once sang on and uploads that instead.
To be honest, my hatred of itunes has several more reasons behind it. But right now I am getting so angry just thinking about it I can barely type.
I am a bonified music nerd. I am brilliant at music technology. But in the short 3 months I have had my ipod (bought only because it has 160GB drive which I really need) I have reset it about 90 times, had to redownload and update itunes at least 3 times a week, it has somehow managed to delete all my music except for Elton John and Phil Collins (you can only listen to Su Su Sudio so many times before suicidal thoughts occur), it’s copied my music 5 times over instead of once and has essentially found 40 other ways to piss me off.
So what should you buy instead?
The Creative Zen Vision W. It is a thing of beauty. I owned it’s predecessor, an old 20GB Zen for about 4 years and it WOULD NOT DIE. I dropped it, I back-packed through a third world country with it, I loaded Britney Spears on it and it still survived.
I also owned the Vision W for a few months, before selling it to buy the ipod. What a mistake. The Vision W only goes up to 60GB and I filled it within weeks, but we had some good times together. Easy to use, built in everything, beautiful large screen.
And it came with simple software, unlike this itunes crap which is the most poorly designed piece of crap the world has ever seen. You can find hundreds of itunes alternatives out there because so many people hate it, for example try yamipod, which begs the question: if a bunch of computer nerds can create, for free, a better version of itunes from their armchairs than why the hell did Apple pay millions for software specialists to create such a horrible program?
And if the ipod is so bad, why is it so popular? I think it’s due to clever marketing and branding, but hey prove me wrong. Tell me what’s right with the ipod.
Why you ask? Why is this woman blaspheming against music?
Let me tell you a few facts about the ipod and itunes.
Itunes has no automatic sensor of doubles. So if you accidentally add a CD twice, it won’t prompt you AS DOES ANY OTHER PIECE OF SOFTWARE IN THE WORLD warning you that you’re about to make doubles, it just goes ahead and adds it twice. And then when you try and get rid of those doubles by selecting the show all duplicates button, it doesn’t just show you the duplicates, it shows you the original too so you have to go through one by one deleting a track.
The offending article
The duplicates button also fails to see that songs with the same name, but by different artists are in fact different songs. It also doesn’t recognise that songs on different albums, like say a live album, are also different songs. I cannot get over the idiocy of this. This may not seem like a big deal, but if you’re into cover songs, or have a lot of live music, you’re essentially boned.
Unlike windows media player, itunes also seems to have a big issue with finding cover art. You can’t just say- go find cover art little itunes, there’s a good boy, there’ll be a treat for you at the end. Because the program is too dumb. It seems to find, instead of say the cover art for David Bowie’s Hunky Dory album, an obscure movie soundtrack the Bowie once sang on and uploads that instead.
To be honest, my hatred of itunes has several more reasons behind it. But right now I am getting so angry just thinking about it I can barely type.
I am a bonified music nerd. I am brilliant at music technology. But in the short 3 months I have had my ipod (bought only because it has 160GB drive which I really need) I have reset it about 90 times, had to redownload and update itunes at least 3 times a week, it has somehow managed to delete all my music except for Elton John and Phil Collins (you can only listen to Su Su Sudio so many times before suicidal thoughts occur), it’s copied my music 5 times over instead of once and has essentially found 40 other ways to piss me off.
So what should you buy instead?
It it was legal I would marry it.
The Creative Zen Vision W. It is a thing of beauty. I owned it’s predecessor, an old 20GB Zen for about 4 years and it WOULD NOT DIE. I dropped it, I back-packed through a third world country with it, I loaded Britney Spears on it and it still survived.
I also owned the Vision W for a few months, before selling it to buy the ipod. What a mistake. The Vision W only goes up to 60GB and I filled it within weeks, but we had some good times together. Easy to use, built in everything, beautiful large screen.
And it came with simple software, unlike this itunes crap which is the most poorly designed piece of crap the world has ever seen. You can find hundreds of itunes alternatives out there because so many people hate it, for example try yamipod, which begs the question: if a bunch of computer nerds can create, for free, a better version of itunes from their armchairs than why the hell did Apple pay millions for software specialists to create such a horrible program?
And if the ipod is so bad, why is it so popular? I think it’s due to clever marketing and branding, but hey prove me wrong. Tell me what’s right with the ipod.
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Comment by Thomas Cox
Idle Hands Are The Devil's Playthings
thanks for your comment and your advice, very soothing to my restless soul. But you're right I here you on the iPod, nothing but trouble. And its a shame too because the concept of portable music is SOOOO good but it never works out as easy as you want. I have, however, got a Creative Zen and I must say it is excellent, highly recommended...but then i did get it as a present.
T
Comment by Harry
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Comment by Kdthestrange
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For some odd reason the pictures have disappeared from this post. I'm not sure what happened there. Just imagine them.