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...
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5 comments:
The mp3 integration gives you 3 ways to get music into the car.
1) USB port for flash drives
2) RCA audio-in jack for any audio source (this is what would be used for "other" mp3 players)
3) iPod interface cable.
I could have just used my old 30gb Archos and plugged into the RCA jack. However, there are a few limitations to doing this. I wouldn't be able to control the mp3 player using the steering wheel-mounted audio controls and the mp3 player would not get charged while it was playing.
By going w/ the iPod and using the iPod interface cable, I can control the iPod from the steering wheel and the iPod charges itself from the car.
It's a tough choice whether or not to "stay away" from the iPod. The player itself is a brilliant design, is incredibly easy to use, and looks /sounds great. It's the iTunes software & its lack of format compatibility that really is the only drawback to the iPods.
Jag's not the only one going down that road.
If you want to give your customer a better in-car mp3 experience (ie. allow control from steering wheel, display of song info on stereo, charge the mp3 player battery, etc.), the car must be able to "talk" with the mp3 player. Because all brands of mp3 players use proprietary hardware/software, there is no universal way to integrate mp3 players besides simply connecting the audio.
So it's just a numbers game. The majority of consumers that own mp3 players have iPods. So if a company is going to spend the time and $$ to design a full-featured mp3 integration system, they will sell the most units if they can integrate with the most popular player out there.
In Jag's case, I think they did a decent job of accommodating non-iPods by including the USB port and RCA jack. However, they skimped by not displaying track info on the stereo. So while I'll be able to skip tracks via the steering wheel, I won't be able to see what the track name is unless I look down at the iPod.
As for whether or not there is alternative software to iTunes, yes there is. However, I've only had a couple days of playing around with the iPod, so I haven't gotten around to trying out any alternative software.
Just make sure to post when you try to turn on your ipod and you get the little frowny ipod face. Almost all my friends have ipods and almost all of them have had problems of some sort. One friend of mine (who will remain nameless) was greeted by the frowny face of death, so she exchanged it for a new one. Within two days the new one was dead too.
But I don't want to be negative. Enjoy your new toy :)
That's the beauty of Costco. If the frowny iPod ever makes an appearance, it just gets exchanged at Costco (although if it happens w/in a year, there's an Apple store near one of my clients, so I can exchange it there).
On another note, I got the iPod car integration installed yesterday. It sounds great! I now have absolutely no need for my old physical cds.
Costco is amazing...
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