IPod: pretty piece of hardware, but nightmare software

Desde el Ecuador, mitad del mundo: Todo lo que se nos ocurra!

Who hasn't been dazzled by the new IPod Nano touch, with its multi-touch screen, its tiny size and its convenient storage capacity? I've been. Recently, my sister bought that little pretty music player, came to me and ask me why she couldn't see her songs on her Ipod Nano. As I managed some Ipods before, I said to her: "don't worry, the only thing you need is the right software tool to transfer files to the Ipod properly". So, I showed up the winamp window (where i was playing my music, as always...), plugged the Ipod in, winamp recognized it and I transferred some songs. Then, I plugged the ipod out, went to search for music in Artists and...nothing!

I opened the Ipod's folder and see that the files where there, but the Ipod denied to play them. I tried the transferring again. This time with and old Ipod Nano 3g. Nothing happen. So I decided to research a little to figure out what was wrong, 'cause winamp always said "Ipod Support".... After a little time, I found this beautiful plugin for managing ipods with winamp: ml_ipod. After got it installed, i tried again, firts with my old age ipod, and worked fine. Tried with the new ipod nano touch, but not succeeded.

After a long time spent in reading Ipod documentation about their support, I realized at last that the firmware and databases contained inside the Ipod ALWAYS CHANGE WITH NEW IPOD GENERATIONS. It means: every time you acquired a brand new ipod model, you'll have to pass through a nightmare installing software tools in order to get the new ipod work just like it's supposed to work.

So I decided to use the primal tool: Itunes (v10), which -I have to say it- sucks!

First of all, it "reorganize" your music library in order to play songs. It copies all your songs in a new folder under the Itunes folder with it's own structure. So, you can see the waste of space (and time, if you bothered in organizing your media library manually or with any tool than Itunes).

Second, (let's imagine that the reorganization of your music library has finished), you plug your brand new Ipod, see how the Itunes recognizes it and you think "it's ready to copy files", but no. First attempt: select files, and press Sync button....nothing happens. Second attempt...nothing. So you decide to search inside the tabs for any irregular message or erroneous behaviour related to your Ipod. Then you find that there's a new update of ipod nano 6g, if you want to sync your files, please install it. There's no other choice than agree and press the button...

Awwwwhhh....while I'm yawning (and writing this entry) I'm waiting till the stupid Itunes update has finished...it has been like one hour since i left it downloading but it still goes on...

Let's face it, Itunes is 100MB of installer, does it really need another 100 MB just to get the Ipod Nano 6G sync function? What the hell, the latest version of winamp is 5.61 and it's installer is nearly 20MB. If you want, you can install the ml_pod plugin which is very pleasant and have more functions than the simple pmp_ipod which is default in winamp. So, again, even with the enhanced ipod support the total installed winamp is just 22 MB.

It's a pity, but ml_ipod doesn't support Ipod Nano 6G yet. I don't use Ipod so often (I get tired of listening to music EVERYWHERE), but having to be bothered with new software installs every time you have another Ipod's model you want to try, it's awkward and simply stupid.

Apple has removed the "soft" prefix from software and turned it into something with the same lack of flexibility like hard-ware does.

Again, nice piece of hardware...but i still have to check if my music files are finally recognized.