Apple: Simplicity to the Extreme
Posted June 30th, 2005 in General, MusicI’ve never been a big Apple fan, nor have I been an Apple hater, but after my iPod experiences last night, I want to vent a little.
Ever since the first iMacs were unveiled, I was convinced that Apple had finally gone totally ‘form before function’, ’style before substance’, etc. They’re more about looking cool than working well. This has also been demonstrated by the fact that the powerbooks don’t have a link light on their RJ-45 jack… do you know how nice it is to just be able to look at the port and know that you’ve found a working port? But no, that would take away from the style of the notebook too much. (My Compaq has a little link light, and another to tell if it’s in 100Mb mode)
On to the iPod issues… a new firmware was released the other day, and I was hoping that they had added the ‘group compilations when browsing’ feature (it’s in iTunes, and they added it to the iPod Photo firmware). So I plugged the iPod into my laptop, which still has a Windows partition. As soon as the the USB device enumerated, iTunes launched and proceeded to delete the database, making my almost 20GB of music unplayable–what the hell? No prompt, no warning, nothing. I know it probably assumed that the database was corrupted becuase I manage my iPod with gtkpod but is that a reason to delete it? If it was a Microsoft written program, it’d probably prompt me three times (you’re about to delete…, are you sure?… really sure?), Apple decided (correctly) that all these prompts are redundant, but isn’t there a happy medium? I think I should have been warned “Your iPod appears to be corrupt/needs to be initialized, please click OK”
Enough ranting for tonight, hopefully after deleting the database and all the files, I’ll have my music back in the morning.
July 3rd, 2005 at 1:55 am
don’t tell me you bought an iPod?!??!
i can’t stand seeing all these people wearing those goddamn white (”mug me”) earphones.
if you’re gonna spend .. what.. $400 on a player, how about another bit on some decent headphones ,huh?!
i’m still waiting for a 4GB or so FLASH (no harddrive in my pocket, yo) player… preferably from iRiver.
not that i really have anything against the iPod Shuffle. they CAN play sequentially, can’t they?
by the way, how do you like iTunes? i still haven’t tried it. i’ve always liked to keep my mp3 collection as simple as possible. just manage them as any other files.. and no ID3… and using only winamp 2.x (with a gapless output plugin)
does iTunes do gapless at all? i won’t even bother if not.
er, anyway, bottom line, geoff holden, i best not see you trotting around in white earbuds when i gets back pretty soon!
pff
matt
(my earphones are sennheisers… for really hot days only)
July 19th, 2005 at 5:54 pm
Hi Geoff,
I feel really sorry for you! - what an unfortunate experience…
But, _did_ the new firmware include the ‘group when browsing’ functionality?
Best wishes, Jakob
July 19th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
Unfortunately, it didn’t include the new functionality. So in the end it was all for nothing.
Geoff