Ipod Troubles
Today I accompained a friend of mine, Izaak, to the Airport in Narita. His flight had a delay of 5 hours. A guy we met in the check-in line commented: “Yeah, load up double that music in your iPod”.
We did not tell him we had an iPod. But, of course, we did. The point is, these days, you can safely bet anyone above a certain social line has one of those little white music boxes. Everyone in my lab got one. Isaac bought one for his brother just one day before going back to Brasil. Wherever you go, you are bound to find someone with those white earphones.
And, if you think about it, it is no wonder. The design is sleek, when compared to other mp3players, and the interface is quite nice as well. And you have apple’s marketing campaing. I myself was wondering about buying one myself.
Until I tried it on my computer yesterday.
As I said before, Isaac bought an iPod for his brother, and wanted to load it with some songs to spend the flight listening to. So he asked me to bring my laptop from my lab to load them on. So I brought it, and we unpacked the iPod.
The first let-down came there - no AC recharger from the box. The iPod reloads its batteries from the USB cable. If you want to recharge it from a power outlet, you have to shell some more money. Not good for trips. I mean, the least you could expect from anything portable is a battery recharger.
But we went on. You can’t just plug the iPod to your usb port and start uploading songs. You must do it through the iTunes software. Bummer, but expected.
The problem was in this software. I brought in my windows laptop because I hadn’t had the time to check on the net how to use the iPod with linux. When we started running the installation software, first thing it complained about autorun being off…
OF COURSE AUTORUN IS OFF!
then it started installing. After installing the itunes software, it automagically also started installing quicktimes - which I did NOT ask to install. See, I just wanted to put some music from my friend’s CD to my friend’s iPod, and I had two pieces of software I did not want in my lap. After it finished installing, it started asking all sorts of nosy registration questions, like my name, country, what name I wanted to give to the iPod, if I wanted to register - Whoa whoa whoa! slow boy! Luckly (?) I had no internet connection running, so I hope all this (fake) information goes down the drain when I uninstall iTunes. By the way, while the software DID work without a ‘net connection (I was afraid it wouldn’t), it would complain every couple of clicks it couldn’t connect to the music store. Nosy!
As warned, the iTunes application without auto-run wouldn’t autodetect when whe exchanged the music CD. Fine. But they could have put on a “detect CD” button for that, no? And, when we used the iTunes application to get the musics from the CD to the iPod, it wouldn’t offer an easy way to label the artist/album. It would try to get this information from the internet, but we couldn’t simply set it for a number of songs at a time, just slowly, painfully, one by one. We ended up using an external application (cdex), to rip the songs from the CDs.
Oh well… In short, it pissed me a lot, and shot my previous admiration for iPods down the drain. Reading some webpages of using iPods with linux tells me that things might me a little more simpler this way, but now I’m seriously considering acquiring a less hyped, and hopefully cheaper model…
Anyway, first I need my new desktop.
March 2nd, 2006 at 2:00 pm
I had no idea about such troublesome with Ipod. So many resources that bothers a lot. Well, I told you once that I won a mp3 player last year, a simple but very functional one. I’m just satified about this one. Its video display is very little, but it’s just a detail. As said around here in Brazil: “For free even injection on the brow”.
I don’t know if I should call this one as a mp3 player, but some days ago I knew another product “like” Ipod that is really amazing and very expensive, though. This one plays DVD quality videos in its up to 7 inch display. And it isn’t everything. It can be used to record videos from tv, even scheduled. Just see:
http://www.archos.com/products/tv_centric/index.html?country=global&lang=en
March 2nd, 2006 at 4:18 pm
Looks cool, but… you know what? I don’t want a DVD player/Picture viewer/Rice Cooker/Vibrator onna stick…
I just want something small that plays MP3. Being able to use it as portable HD is also a plus.
Less is More.
March 3rd, 2006 at 4:05 am
True… I had some of those dissatisfactions with mine. Quoting Silvia about the lack of an AC recharger “What if I’m going to travel to the beach, for example… so I’d have to bring my laptop with me just to recharge it!?” (Note that I don’t have a laptop)… Selling an AC separatedly was bad… Making it so dependable of software (specially those I didn’t ask) too…
Having to run ITunes to transfer isn’t very nice either… I spend a whole afternoon trying to figure how to put some movies. And about some pictures, when I deleted all I had uploaded previously just because I had changed the folder to Synchronize…
It did a thing though… bring my pics from Japan safe and sound. But with so many troubles, maybe only an HD would have been more appropriate…
Besides, as you’re in Japan, mobile phones can do basically everything the IPod can…
March 10th, 2006 at 1:43 am
Some days ago I found out that in each second around one Ipod is sold in the whole world. It is such a big fever! Although all problems we can find in Ipod, this was a big and smart release from Steave Jobs.
I really have to admit, the turning point was to sell legal songs on the internet for reasonable price through the iTunes. I’m sure that this kind of market is very attractive in rich countries, not so much in Brazil, where almost none cares about legalism and copyright. Moreover, Apple was expecting to sell 1 million music in the first 6 months of activities, but they beat that mark in just 6 days and they just got sold their billionth song from iTune music store.