Category Archives: iPod

iPod and other MP3 players

Apple announces iPod Nano (and some other stuff)

iPod NanoWell, after much speculation, this morning (AU time) Apple announced a swag of new stuff, including:

  • the quite ludicrously tiny iPod Nano (I reckon I’d lose it)
  • the very expected Motorola ROKR mobile phone, the first to include iTunes (shame it’s a Motorola. I hate Motorolas.)
  • a shiny new version of the iTunes software, featuring parental controls (woo hoo, does this mean no more Lenny Kravitz’s What The F%$# are we saying for my kids?), syncing data with Outlook (at smeggin’ last), playlist and shuffle enhancements
  • some exclusive content to the iTunes store, which therefore means we CAN’T BUY IT IN AUSTRALIA (grumble)

iTrip Frequency For Melbourne

Up until a week or so ago I used 91.5 as my iTrip frequency in Melbourne. Most of my driving is in the inner West and inner East and it worked fine until ‘Vega 91.5‘ muscled in on my bandwidth.

I’ve now switched to 95.3 and it seems to work okay. Anyone else have suggestions for frequencies that work well in Melbourne?

Why I both love and hate my iPod

iPodI have a love/hate relationship with my iPod. (It’s a 40Gb 4th generation model.)

Why I love my iPod

The design is exquisite. The whole thing is beautiful. Even the power adapter is beautiful.

I’ve never had an MP3 player before, and I love using it.

Lock button: brilliant. Click wheel menu system: easy.

Bung a CD into the PC, it gets the track names from CDDB, rips it easily.

Syncing music is fast and easy via USB 2.

There’s some very nifty addons available for it.

Get a good tune on it, pump up the volume, and I’m in heaven. You should have seen me dancing around the kitchen last night.

Why I hate my iPod

Can’t use it with more than one PC. 40Gb of portable storage in my pocket, and I can’t use it for moving files. (There are shareware tools to do this.)

It has no radio.

Yesterday Windows was recognising it as a drive, not an iPod. iTunes then complained another user was using it. I had to reboot to fix it. Maybe it works better with Macs, but I shouldn’t have to buy one to find out.

It didn’t come with a belt-clip. Okay, so maybe that would spoil the design. So I put it in a skin. The skin is pretty cool, but it doesn’t look as nice as it does out of the skin.

Maybe I haven’t been careful enough with the headphones, but the wire got pulled obviously a bit too hard on one earpiece, and now there’s a little interference from it. My cheapie Sony earphones are tougher, if not as visually appealing.

It doesn’t play WMA. I’m not totally enamoured of WMA, but it’s the only thing offered by online music stores in Australia, since there are continual delays with the iTunes Music Store AU.

There are almost constant horror stories of people having their iPods freeze up, batteries die, or other hassles.

All of these hassles seem to result in the iPod going off to the iPod hospital and coming back empty.

iTunes can’t work through the firewall at work, at least for CDDB lookups.

iTunes on Windows follows the Quicktime example of Apple trying to make their software look like Mac. If I wanted a metallic grey window title bar (which slightly changes shades of grey when it has focus), I’d have changed it to be that way in my Windows settings.

Conclusion

This is my first MP3 player. It works, and I’m not even considering of replacing it while it works. But if I had the choice over again, I’d buy another brand. I don’t know which, but it wouldn’t be Apple. In line with my movie reviews getting a thumbs up or thumbs down, I give the iPod a thumbs down.Thumbs down

Update Thursday 8am. Great feedback about some of these issues in the comments. Thank you all, I’ll be investigating further.

What I Want

After watching Sin City the other day I decided I didn’t want to wait.

What I want is a directors commentary that I can take to the cinema with me. I’d download it, throw it on the pod and listen to it in the cinema. I’m sure it would be great for repeat business; go once to watch the film, then again to listen to the commentary. It would be spoken word, you could play it soft and no one would hear it.

Maybe Cameron‘s The Podcast Network could try and flex their muscles?

iTunes Catches Podcast Wave

The latest version of iTunes has been released overnight. Unfortunately there’s still no music store for Australia but you can, at last, synch your podcasts directly from within its interface. This may spell the end of the nascent podcatchers industry but should prove a boon for Cameron’s The Podcast Network.

Update

And this just spotted on the BBC site :

A software update for the click-wheel iPods and the iPod minis will offer a podcast menu, including bookmarking and the ability to show podcast artwork.

You can get the iPod updater here : Ipod Updater

Update

No way of importing your existing OPML or adding your own custum feed that I can see at a quick glance.

Another Update

I should have RTFM. You can add your own podcast by entering the URL under the ‘Advanced | Subscribe to Podcast’ option.

Hotspots, iPod and the death of cassettes

The Hotspot index says Melbourne has 26,243 people per hotspot. Sydney comes in at 36,000, Australia as a whole at 42,850. US 38,632. UK 22,963. But the modern Asian megacities beat all, with HK at 19,654 and Singapore 12,604. In Melbourne (and I assume other cities) they were investigating the idea of hotspots on trains, which could be a moneyspinner. Would almost make an hour-long commute from somewhere like Frankston or Belgrave bearable.

The Queen has an iPod. Hmmm, can’t see her rocking out to Bohemian Rhapsody.

Meanwhile MP3 players and CDs appear to be killing off cassettes. Yeah, and good riddance, say I. Poor sound quality and no random access combined with a fragile physical media. But it does remind me of a classic line from Alas Smith & Jones: “What is Dolby? It’s basically a very complicated system for playing cassettes with the little green light on, or off.”

Copying iPod to computer

Turns out it is possible to copy songs from an iPod back to a computer. Tony found this article which details how: in summary, you hook up the Pod, and your computer should be able to see a drive containing its contents.

In Windows you’ll need to display Hidden Files. Look for the ipodcontrol/music directory, and copy it back to your hard drive.

On a Mac, do a cp from the command line: cp -R /Volumes/youriPodName/iPod_Control/Music DestinationPath

Dialog inviting me to wipe the iPod clean, since I'm plugging it into a new computerThere’s a catch: Since the iPod isn’t registered on my computer, when I connect, iTunes pipes up to ask me if I want to wipe the Pod. After you’ve replied “Hell, no” the drive doesn’t show up in Explorer. What you have to do is leave that iTunes dialog unanswered while you copy the files.

Once the files are on your hard drive, you can import them back into iTunes, though you’ll find the tracks are stored in a bunch of different directories, and dammit if iTunes makes you add them one directory at a time.

Still, it works, and it means not only can I wipe the Pod and copy everything over again, but in future I don’t have to keep all those tracks on my PC if I need the diskspace.

In other iPod news, Apple is set to offer US$50 gift vouchers to early iPod battery victims.

Don’t Believe The Hype

For iPod owners contemplating purchasing an iTrip, pause a second.

I’ve been unhappy with my iPod battery life pretty much since I purchased it six months ago. Finally I’d had enough and sent it off to Apple support to be checked. It took them three weeks to run a one day test and the test showed it was fine. They sent it back and, $20 later, I had my same iPod that still seemed to have a battery life considerably shorter than the promoted 12 hours.

It was only a few days later I realised what was wrong.

a) I mainly use my iPod in the car to and from work.
b) I use a Griffin iTrip
c) The iTrip FAQ told me ” it uses VERY little power from the iPod and has no real effect on battery life”.

It was believing C that cost me $20 and no iPod for almost a month.

I finally twigged that C may not be correct so I ran my own test.

I kept the volume level the same for each day, set it to shuffle play and did not touch the unit until the battery expired.

Day 1 – iPod, no headphones. Batteries lasted 11.5 hours
Day 2 – iPod with iTrip. Batteries lasted 7.5 hours (No power bars visible for about the last hour so it looked as though it had run out after 6)
Day 3 – iPod with headphones attached. 11 hours.

Now this is very unscientific and a sample size of one but the iTrip reduced my iPod battery life by approx 32% – that seems a lot more than a ‘VERY little’ reduction to me.

That’s just stupid

Okay okay, I admit it, when my USB port at home was suspect, I loaded up my new iPod at work. Now I’ve got a new computer, I plugged the iPod into it, and fired up iTunes. I didn’t expect this:

Dialog inviting me to wipe the iPod clean, since I'm plugging it into a new computer

No two ways about it, that plain sucks.

I know Apple probably needed to show it was providing a degree of copy protection to get the co-operation to set up the iTunes store, but really, this is stupid. They could have at least allowed you to connect the iPod to a handful of computers.

There is an alternative: a Winamp plugin called ml-iPod which lets you copy tracks to the Pod without that kind of nastiness. I haven’t got it to work yet, mind you — it doesn’t see the device. Rest assured that I’m working on that…

New iTunes stores

iPod (from apple.com)Apple has opened new iTunes stores in… Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with a free track for every Swiss citizen. (Großmutter! Schnell! Was ist Ihr voller Name und Geburtsdatum?)

And Australia? Well The Register says It was claimed this week that only major label troubles prevented the company from opening ITMS Australia last month as planned. Damn labels.

Meanwhile Apple continues to dominate in sales of music players, with new stats showing the iPod Shuffle has more than half of the US flash player market, and iTunes recently sold its 350 millionth song download.

All this is good news for the continued availability of non-copy-protected music. While Apple continues to sell and support MP3, but not WMA, and remains dominant in sales of hardware, MP3 will remain strong.

I don’t want a music format that’s copy protected. I don’t want to pay for music and have it die with my player. Like CDs, it has to last (I’ve got 17 year old discs that are still going strong) and be copyable, so I can move the music onto whatever the Next Great Device for my music is — whether it be a replacement iPod when my battery eventually gives up, or some other new and shiny device in a few years when the iPod seems old and clunky.

Though of course, in Australia at present, even just ripping your CDs to MP3 is illegal.

PS. 11pm. Actually I should probably use iTunes Store before blessing Apple too much, since there seems to be a lot of rumbling about whatever DRM they use.

iPod Battering

I love my iPod, it is an amazing piece of technology that really seems to make your life better. Those of you scoffing now obviously don’t have one, trust me, when you get one you will agree.

The only thing I haven’t been happy with the is its battery life. After six months I now lose a quarter of a full charge if I don’t have it plugged in for a day and I’m only getting about four hours of play time at 60% volume, so I called Apple support today. After the normal half hour of going round in circles I was told two things.

1. Don’t recharge using your cradle. There isn’t enough power from the USB card to fully charge the battery. Always charge the pod using a wall socket.

2. Update and reformat the pod. I assume this works in a similar fashion to a defrag. In the fifty minutes since I’ve done this I’ve transferred 2600 songs back on the unit. Thank god for USB2.

I’ll give it a week or so and if it hasn’t worked I’ll be sending it off for a battery replacement, which is actually a pot luck iPod replacement, but I want my iPod to last more than a hundred shuffles.