iPod iPeoples - Few questions... before I take a hammer to it.

I would just like to start out by saying... "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGG" !!!
:hairpull::hairpull::hairpull::hairpull::hairpull::hairpull::hairpull::hairpull::hairpull::hairpull::hairpull:

Eh hem, ok, I feel a bit better now..
Anyway, little sister got a new iPod (Nano), I decided to check out her old one (mini 4gb)
Well, after 2 DAYS of trying every little trick on the book, I finally got the iPod reset, cleared, and talking to my PC :ironic:

MAC people, I almost dont want to hear from you
I am sure you will all say its great, that it works just fine.

Know how I finally fixed it? Reset it via my brothers Mac Book.
Then, it would finally let my computer reset it, and format it to windows.

OK, thats where the complaints boils over...
1. Format it to Windows !!!!????? You have to be kidding me!
I can go out and buy a $15 MP3 player off ebay and plug it right into a PC or MAC, and its going to pop up as a DRIVE, and let me slap the music right one there.

2. It seems the iPod will not let you use it as a drive like other MP3 players. You have to set a partition for non-music?
I need to look into this more, but at any rate, not being able to put music on it via Windows Explorer is obsurd. You have to use iTunes.

3. iTunes has to be one of the worst players I have used, I just hate how it works, and especially how it displays things.
Winamp and its Library is MUCH better laid out and functional.

4. In the same way I dont like how iTunes displays the music, I dont like how its organized on the iPod.
I want it in folders just as I have it on my HD. This means I cant have a folder, that has misc. bands in it, and copy it to the iPod. They will no longer exist as a group of songs in a folder, you have to look them up via Artist, Title, etc.
Now, I know I can make a playlist for the folder, then use that to call them up, but, ahhh, why should I have to go through all that trouble?

5. ahhhhhh Can I not delete a song from the iPod, via the iPod?

Maybe I am just turned off my this bad experience?
I figure if I was a MAC user I would have had a much smoother experience, and maybe feel better about it.
But the same shortcoming I see in the iPod, are also some reasons I will not buy a MAC.
I will say that the iPod itself, seems like a nice player, for the most part, I like MACs sleek simple looks.
It seems well built, and I like the touch sensitive "wheel".

But the drawbacks they have are quite substantial in my mind. Enough to make me never buy one.
Which is a shame, I try hard to like them, my brother has one of the new shuffles,
really tiny, its basically a couple buttons and a clip, still.

So, to conclude....
Wait, didnt I have questions? or just Ranting Frustration Venting? :thinking:
Any way of solving some of the issues I have with iPods? (I swear, if one MAC user tells me to buy a MAC I'll,,, I'll lose it.)

~John

He J,
I am a very windows oriented person(who works on a older mac at work and hates it). the Ipod will work great with windows, you just have to learn its ins and outs. I have had mutiple mp3 players and the ipod is great. I am a slow typer, so if you want to call me, Im pretty sure i have cheap long distance on my cell.(pm me if interested).

otherwise I can type up some tips as needed.
cheers.

Crud. I typed a long post then lost it.

I think smart playlists are great.

You can easily added a folder (File/Add Folder to Library) then group select all these songs (actually they should still be selected from adding them), then right click and choose Get Info, click the Info tab. Then in the grouping box add a keyword that desrcibes the folder (e.g. Metal).

Then create a smart playlist where "Grouping contains Metal". Then your iPod can load this playlist and when you choose to play it, it will play only songs from that folder.

More powerful is to make more smart playlists that call other ones. Example my 3Mix playlist calls 3 other playlists: Newly Added, Least Recently Played, and Random. By controlling the sizes and star ratings that are in these playlists I can get a mix of music I like.

Greg

LOL....a fellow Mac-a-phobe! I have never owned a Mac, and never will. However, I do know about Ipods and Nanos. There are real limitations to using them with the iTunes program and their digital rights management crap.

I can see the appeal and nice design function of them if you look at it as a self contained mp3 player setup that must be used the way they want you to use it....which has always been the story with Mac. You must conform to the Mac, whereas the PC is more able to conform to you. You cannot make most Apple products do all the things you are used to with PC's.

There are custom written programs such as Rockbox which can get around some of that however. I have used the open source Rockbox on my old Archos mp3 player for years, and they do have it written now for iPods. You will have to spend some time reading how to set it up with iPods, but it is superb and free open source software.

This is why I bought three of the Archos 20GB USB-2 MP3 players many years ago before they stopped making them....just so I had a backup. They work exactly like how we are used to the PC file/folder structure, and I upgraded the one to an 80GB HD, and have been using it almost every day for over 2 years with never any problems.

perfect start greg.
smart playlists all the way.

metadata(artist, album, etc filled in and matching) is a must. harder if you did't rip them from your own CDs and gotten from misc. sources.

to "delete" songs is to rate them with one star. then you can have the smart playlists set remove all 1 star songs.

more to follow as other can chime in.
I have had the shuffle, mini, first gen nano and loved them all.
upgraded headphones are a must. great pair here, very comfortabe.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...36765?_encoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance

LuxLuthor said:

LOL....a fellow Mac-a-phobe! I have never owned a Mac, and never will. However, I do know about Ipods and Nanos. There are real limitations to using them with the iTunes program and their digital rights management crap.

I can see the appeal and nice design function of them if you look at it as a self contained mp3 player setup that must be used the way they want you to use it....which has always been the story with Mac. You must conform to the Mac, whereas the PC is more able to conform to you. You cannot make most Apple products do all the things you are used to with PC's.

There are custom written programs such as Rockbox which can get around some of that however. I have used the open source Rockbox on my old Archos mp3 player for years, and they do have it written now for iPods. You will have to spend some time reading how to set it up with iPods, but it is superb and free open source software.

This is why I bought three of the Archos 20GB USB-2 MP3 players many years ago before they stopped making them....just so I had a backup. They work exactly like how we are used to the PC file/folder structure, and I upgraded the one to an 80GB HD, and have been using it almost every day for over 2 years with never any problems.

Click to expand...

To interject, Itunes of 2 years ago sucked. I used anapod exporer to do what you do with rockbox. Itunes now works great.

Make sure you have the latest version of Itunes and the ipod firmware first.
also check out view options to customize more to your liking.

Thanks for the info guys,
I got the iPod working, got songs dumped to it, and been using it.
I just dont like drawbacks I mentioned above.

The smart playlist stuff is neat, dont get me wrong, BUT,
it should be an ad-on, not a replacement, to using just the folder structure.

That RockBox looks interesting, but it was enough trouble getting the iPod running at all on my PC,
I dont think I want to push my luck reprogramming the iPod itself hehe.

I have a set of these headphones,
http://www.sennheiserusa.com/newsite/productdetail.asp?transid=005206
They sound great, and you barely feel them on your head.
I cant stand the inside the ear kind.

~John

I, too, prefer PC over Mac. The iPod, in particular, is something "else," though. It's so "hip" and "with it" that I recently saw an electronics catalog that had a picture on the cover of a girl sitting with a laptop (Vaio) on her lap, while listening to an iPod, instead of just listening to music on the laptop.

A few months ago, I got a Cowon A2 which is absolutely fantastic - plug-'n'-play, transfer files through Explorer, preserves folder structure, wide codec support, and a beautiful screen. I didn't need to install any software for it on my PC at all. Cowon has an "iAudio" line of players with various capabilities.

Links:
www.anythingbutipod.com
www.cowonamerica.com
http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/cowon/a2/
http://www.creative.com/products/welcome.asp?category=213

Greg,
That grouping tip, can you add more than one grouping keyword?
with a space, or comma separating them?

~John

Yup. Just space separated. The two I use most are Canadian (for Canadian bands) and Female (for female lead vocals). When you make your smart playlist just make sure you select "contains" when creating the playlist. If you select "equals" then it would have to be an exact match.

I also have the Year set for all my music so I have 70's, 80's, 90's etc playlists in case I get a mood for one of those eras.

Greg

1. Yes you do. This is because Macs use a different filesystem than windows. Other players work because they are formated for the old crappy windows filesystem (fat32). Most players are formated with fat32 because it does make it easy to move it between platforms. That doesn't change the fact that the filesystem is terrible. The current Windows filesystem (NTFS) is also incompatible with Mac. This really isn't a big deal though. Apple tells you exactly how to fix this.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60983

2. You can use your ipod as an external drive. Just check "enable disk use" in itunes.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61131

You can thank the record companies for making it difficult to copy music onto and off of the ipod. Apple is at the whim of music companies with the itunes store and thus doesn't want the ipod to look like a music piracy device. Dumb I know, but blame the music companies for treating their customers like crooks. There are third party utilities that let you copy the tracks off though.

3. I'm not a big fan of itunes either. You only need to use it to copy music and to manage playlists on the ipod though.

4. I think your system for managing music would be very unwieldy on the ipod. I could just see manually choosing from 80 gigs of mp3s this way via the scroll wheel. It would be terrible. Artist and album searches are really better here. As you said, playlists are really the way to go, and are easy enough to create.

5. Why? I've never wanted to delete a track from my mp3 player via my mp3 player. It's not like you can do anything with the space when you're not at a computer anyway. Regardless the ipod is designed to hold all of your music and to be in sync with your music collection. That's how they expect it to be used. It makes more sense to delete the offending track from your collection and then sync your ipod.

Things like browsing for specific songs via filename or folder or deleting individual tracks really isn't too practical when on the go or if you have lots of mp3s. My collection for example contains over 120gigs consisting of 100s maybe even 1000s of cds and 10000s of tracks. I easily can fill an 80 gig ipod. With the ipod full, browsing in the manner you suggest just doesn't scale.

Hi John,

I think once you get used to your Ipod,you'll love it. It took me some getting used to but now I LOVE iTunes and my new 8gig Nano.

I love playlists. I don't normally care where the files are on my computer. iTunes can keep track of that.

When I add new songs they load onto my iPod in the Unrated playlist. I listen to them a few times and give them ratings from 1 star (never want to hear again) to 5 star (best). Then they get to join my other playlists. I have 4-5 star playlists for when I just want to hear my favorites, 3-5 star for good plus favorites, and 2-5 star for all the stuff I want to hear (and by controlling how many 2, 3, 4 and 5 star songs are on the iPod I can control how many favorites versus how many good or tolerable songs I hear).

It may seem odd if you are used to manually picking the songs to go on your mp3 player but now that I have my various playlists I much prefer it this way.

Greg

I got one of the iPod nano clones a while back and it's great - better quality than I expected. Got another one for the other half and same thing - excellent quality - MP4 with video, voice recorder FM tuner and all the goods and very compatible - PNP on the USB port. I think it's the same thing they are selling at dealextreme - about $26 for a 1 GB unit IIRC. And of course beats the heck outta Apples price. Sorry Steve but I never like you anyway

If you're the type of person that wants know and control what goes in/out/in between your box, you'll absolutely hate Mac's and their "transparent user interface"... :green: I go :hairpull: every time I gotta deal with a Mac (or some sort of iSoftware).

ticey, I'm migrating to Linux. Long live Ubuntu!!

I think the difference between mac and pc comes down to this. Do you want an appliance or a computer. Those 'it just works' adds are a laugh, my toaster just works and i dont expect any more from it. The level of expectation on my PC computer however is extraordinarily higher!

Yo GreenLED - Ubuntu is pretty slick eh it rund my media pc, soon to be home automation\media PC

Back on topic, the Ipod (the physical hardware) has been designed very well. The interface is fine but i agree, a folder tree option would be soooooooooo nice. As soon as you get into any ipod related software, well, that is the end of good design and the start of the appliance.

It's all been covered in this thread already but a quick summary:

Format the iPod for PC (i.e. FAT 32) and it will work on both PC and Mac.

In iTunes check "Enable Disk Use" and the iPod will mount just like a hard drive.

iTunes on Mac is heaps better than iTunes on PC.

Mac OS X is Unix based, so is actually a lot easier than Windows to control everything if you know a bit of Unix and command line functions.


Bottom line, whatever floats your boat, it's just a machine.
What you do with it is the important thing.

MAC, seems we either love or hate them

I agree, MACs, and especially the iPods, are setup to be too automated, they dont give you direct control over things.
This is fine for a a typical MAC user, as they are used to things being this way, and used to some things being taken care of by the computer, etc.
But as a PC user, *I* want to tell it what to do and how.

Here is what is really killing me...
Not all my MP3s have perfect tags, go figure.
Well, there are songs that are loading into iTunes that dont even have the artist info there.
Well, they might as well be completely lost now.
They are all at the bottom of the list, in just some random order.
If I still had *MY* folder tree, they would be exactly where they should be.

I really dont see how using the iPods Artist list, made from the tags,
could be better than my folder tree, that is setup by artist.
The only thing the tags would be good for, is cross referencing.
For example, if there was a Certain bands song in a sound track to a movie,
it would find that also.

Like I said, the player is nice, when I am just listening to it, I like it.
But as soon as I plug it into the computer my blood pressure sky rockets.
Again, all this is enough that I would never buy one, I would actually buy the knockoff first, just to keep a normal file system. :ironic:

~John

I had the same transition pains when I switched from a folder-based unit to the ipod. I had to re-rip all my cds, and manually fix my "other" mp3s. But after this, it was gravy. I couldn't fathom going back.

What is the best, simplest program that can look at your MP3s and fix all the tags from internet databases?
I know they make those, just dont recall what the good ones are. :thinking:

~John