EvilApple

I recently upgraded my mp3 player to one of the brand new 80Gb Apple iPods. I'm still very anti-iPod, however, I'm getting mp3 integration installed in my car next week and it was designed to work with...you guessed it...the iPod.

Up until this point, I've always just hated the iPod / iTunes out of principle, without ever really using either product.

Now that I've had my iPod for a couple days now, I'm starting to find lots of reasons to despise the Apple products. Unfortunately, due to the integration with my car, I'll probably keep the iPod instead of going w/ a better player from Creative or Archos, but I thought I'd post the annyances that I've come across with my new gadget.

1) When told to synch up Outlook's contact list and calendar, iTunes completely locks up. This happened each time I tried to synch for the first day. Finally I reset all of the synch settings, instructing the iPod to only synch music & movies. Sure enough...solved the freezing problem.

2) When you have a large library of files in .wma, iTunes gladly asks if you'd like it to convert your files over to iTunes compatible (AAC) files. I had a couple thousand songs that were in .wma format, so I told iTunes to go ahead and convert them. iTunes took between 1-5 minutes for EACH song that it converted. In other words, it would have taken a week to convert all of those songs.

I cancelled that conversion, and just used EZ CD-DA Extractor to convert into AACPlus V2 files and all 2000+ files were converted in just a couple hours. (NOTE: These AACPlusV2 files are great...very small files compared to .wma and even smaller compared to .mp3)

3) If you have any .wpl or .m3u playlist files in your music library, iTunes will create duplicate copies of any songs on the playlist when importing into your library. After clearing out the iPod and starting my library import from scratch, I found that a ton of my songs had been imported twice. A quick Google search on the problem revealed this gem. Instead of importing the playlist files as a playlist, it simply imports all of the songs on the playlist...even if it already imported those files. So I again deleted everything out of my iTunes library and removed all .m3u and .wpl files from my mp3 directories.

4) Even though I have appx 10,000 songs in my "Full Albums" directory on my computer and I told iTunes to add this entire directory to my iTunes library, I only ended up with about 8,000 songs in my iTunes library. After I realized the a good chunk of these were duplicates, iTunes really only imported about half of the folder that I wanted to import.

I have now blanked out my library and the iPod again. I'm going to have to go through and import chunks of albums at a time instead of importing the entire directory. Hopefully I can figure out why it selectively imports some but not others (iTunes didn't import my VH - Live Stages cd...hmmmm)

Stay tuned for more rants as I complete my conversion over to the iPod dark side...

Been a while

It's been a while since I've been on here, but wanted to post a couple pictures from the Pi Kappa Phi 10-year reunion from a couple weeks ago. The Miami chapter was formed in 1996 so alumni from the founding through the present all converged on Oxford for a very nice banquet celebrating the occasion.

PiKapp 10-year

Sep 16, 2006 - 4 Photos

Thanks to Lugi and Bally for the pix.