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.