Everyone loves Apple’s iPod, or at least pretends not to hate it. I’ve got one, though there are things I just wish it wasn’t.
- It takes a lot to shuffle. Go pick a playlist, an artist, or an album. Then suddenly decide that you want to shuffle the tracks instead of listening to them sequentially. You can’t do it with a button, not even with a few keypresses. You’re at least several clicks and wheel movements away. Can’t we have it like a traditional CD player?
- You need iTunes to add media, and you can’t just copy them back. Well, at least officially. Of course there are unofficial solutions like my favorite yamipod but it would’ve been nice to do everything with a simple file explorer.
- It can’t play just any movie. The iPod requires specific encoding parameters and formats to play a video file. It would’ve been nice if it could deal with DivX and MPEG directly, right?
- Photo storage is a joke. Keeping photos in your iPod is
a jokemore complicated than it sounds. The files take more space in the iPod than they would in your PC. Now where’s the sense in that? And you can’t just store them directly, instead mimicking a mirroring of sorts that further wastes storage space. - Digital music isn’t only MP3 or AAC. Why can’t we have ogg vorbis, flac, and all the other philosophically, legally free formats?
I’m sure you have something against your favorite gadget. 😉
I totally agree with the shuffle bit. What I do instead is shuffle the playlists in iTunes and just play it sequentially. I don’t listen to just one artist or one album at a time: I always use playlists, so this set-up works for me. 🙂
I know exactly what you mean about #2, and the file formats. This whole thing of their piracy protection gets annoying sometimes.
I’m having a hard time dredging up any complaint about my iPod because I currently don’t have mine — so I miss it really badly. It’s all positive thoughts right now, lol. Which iPod do you have? =)
For photos, are you unchecking the “put the original sized photo on the iPod as well” (or whatever the setting is called; I’m at work so I can’t look it up) setting?
@Eugene: But it’s the same randomized order every time you listen to that playlist, right?
@Amanda: So what happened to your iPod? I have a white 30GB 5G. Btw, I can sense something exciting in your blog, hmm. Hehe. 😉
@Ian: Yes, I have that unchecked. I even use smaller–sized photos for the iPod, but they still consume more space than they really are. I think this is something Apple really isn’t concerned about, unfortunately.
File-explorer like, iPod music organizer? MediaMonkey.
MediaMonkey works but it sometimes manages to corrupt some of my metadata. Good nonetheless, but better if iTunes could do it officially.
Hmm, weird. My photos on my iPod take up a miniscule amount of space. I wonder what the difference is?
Hmm, now I have to look into this, maybe I’m doing something wrong. 🙁
I just took a look at my iPhoto library: the original files are around 106 MB, but the modified ones — the ones that were edited in iPhoto — are around 62 MB. I think that might be the difference right there; that’s almost half of the size. So apparently editing your photos in iPhoto makes your images smaller as well? Hmm, I’m still not sure how that works…
Now there must be something really wrong with my iPod!
I have the same probolem – the pisctures on my Ipod video 30gb take much more space than on PC. And it’s really up to 10x more space. Something is wrong. They are all reduced to ipod screen by Itunes and there are no originals on the Ipod. Very strange. I still have no idea how it works.