iPod Touch and the ‘classic’ geek blunder

The most famous blunder of all time, according to Vizzini from the Princess Bride, is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” but the most famous blunder, I think, for a geek is not to research fully the geek tech they are going to buy.

I treated myself to an 16Gb iPod Touch yesterday, I’ve been meaning to get an iPod for a few years and being a user of iTunes at home for my music collection it was a logical step. The iPod Touch is a great little device, not too heavy and has a great screen but hey you already know that because “we” geeks have read all the reviews, and if lucky enough to have a nearby Apple Store we’ve had a play with one.

So late yesterday afternoon I took a spin down Pitt Street here in Sydney to Next Bytes (Apple Reseller) and purchased my iPod Touch, I even bought a nice silicon protector for it. I resisted the urge to open it and play with it on the trip home and ripped the packaging off once I was in front of my PC.

I plugged it in to the USB socket and started iTunes only to be greated by the message:

“This iPod cannot be used because the required software is not installed. Run the iTunes installer to remove iTunes, then install the 64-bit version of iTunes.”

Darn, I just assumed that iTunes would work with the iPod on my 64-bit Windows Vista system, yes CD Burning did not but I don’t use iTunes for that so I didn’t even think about it. The iTunes error message is intriging though it does imply that they is a 64-bit version of iTunes but searches via Google and on the Apple website have not turned up a 64-bit version of iTunes.

To their credit Apple do have a support article that states that iTunes is not supported on ANY 64-bit version of Windows and a search of “itunes +64-bit” has this as the #1 result.

I don’t think Apple are naive or shortsighted to not support 64-bit Windows for iTunes and this error message gives hope that its being worked on (I’m actually wondering if 64-bit support may be related to the recent revelation that the MacOS X Leopard has hidden/in development support for Windows PE binary/executable files).

 I’m not overjoyed that I have to use a different PC for my iPod sync’ing it is inconvenient and a real pain copying music libraries between PCs (8000 files took 5 hours last night on a gigabit network)

But I’ll bide my time and will be eagerly awaiting 64-bit support in a future release of iTunes and will certainly in the future be checking the compatibility of the software as well as the hardware for ANY tech I buy.

 Edit @ 1235hrs: My spelling and grammer has been really bad this morning so after a review I cleaned things up, sorry about that if you were unfortunate enough to read it prior to now and wondered what I was talking about.

4 thoughts on “iPod Touch and the ‘classic’ geek blunder

  1. Randall Swain

    Maybe I have missed something Phil, but if it is a 16GB iPod Touch, why wouldn’t you just transfer over 16GB of music to the other machine? That way you can fill your iPod with your current playlist for example, while biding your time for Apple.

    Wouldn’t that be more simple than transferring all your media to the one machine? I’m guessing you use your 64bit PC to run more than just your iPod.

    Just my 2 cents….

  2. Phil

    The other machine in question is my Windows Home Server that holds my music I actually configure iTunes on my primary PC (the 64-bit one) to point to the network location where my music is. I had to move the music all to the server for backup purposes but I’d rather use iTunes on my PC, that has been configured with all my playlists, ratings and ID tags where as having to use it on the server means that I have to install iTunes, create a new library (Apple don’t make it easy to manage one playlist from multiple machines, or so my experience has been) and then import all the music into that.

    Presently my music collection is around 39Gb in size this is combined music from both myself and my wife that we’ve either got the CD’s for or have purchased electronically from iTunes or other services. I know there are duplicates in our collections but I really can’t fathom sorting through them at the moment 🙂

    And my 64-bit machine is my primary one, it holds all my development environment(s) and, of course, my music collection.

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