I'm hating Apple today (unlike yesterday or tomorrow ;) ). I'm currently in iPod-iTunes hell and ...
I'm hating Apple today (unlike yesterday or tomorrow ;) ). I'm currently in iPod-iTunes hell and I think it's going to take at least another 24 hours to get out. Here's the story.
- A nearly full iPod Classic 160 starts playing tricks where you play one track and actually get another. So it looks like the database is corrupted
- Download ephpod and run verify database. It confirms maybe 3-400 files that are corrupt. Which means clicking on a dialog 3-400 times
- Try and run rebuild database in ephpod but there are files with no ID3 tags and meaningless names
- Decide to flatten and reload the iPod
- Ephpod points me at iTunes. iTunes takes 45 minutes to start up because it says it's "verifying media store"
- iTunes started so it's time to flatten the iPod. The option is helpfully called "restore" when "restore" is really not what it does! Actually it reloads the firmware, sets all settings to default and flattens the disk.
- Reset all the customisations I'd done on the iPod like shortening menus and turning off the clicker
- Fire up sharepod and start copying the library. "you have asked to sync 21,000 files, this may take several hours". The sync fails after 1000 or so.
- Go back 3 steps and flatten the ipod again. Start copying files a letter at a time.
Somewhere in here, I had a look at the wikipedia page on alternatives to iTunes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_managers What a mess! Apple keeps changing the rules. Commercial apps like Winamp don't or can't keep up so support for the Touch and iPhone is often lacking. The free tools are incomplete or buggy. The official tools like iTunes have a bunch of horrible quirks.
So:-
- If an iPod gets screwed in even a small, minor way, there seems to be no real alternative to flattening it and reloading everything. This takes a *long* time.
- None of the management softwares including iTunes can really cope with *big* libraries
- Apple really doesn't want or like any 3rd parties using the iPod at all, at all.
- iTunes on Windows still sucks. I'm led to believe iTunes on Mac sucks nearly as badly. If you're quirky enough to be using something other than Windows or Mac, you're stuck with incomplete support.
- The iPod has some silly market share, but everyone hates this part of the process. We love the device, we universally hate the management software. We universally hate the way this moderately expensive bit of consumer bling is apparently a fundamentally broken, disposable item.
I'm hating Apple today (unlike yesterday or tomorrow ;) ). I'm currently in iPod-iTunes hell and I think it's going to take at least another 24 hours to get out. Here's the story.
- A nearly full iPod Classic 160 starts playing tricks where you play one track and actually get another. So it looks like the database is corrupted
- Download ephpod and run verify database. It confirms maybe 3-400 files that are corrupt. Which means clicking on a dialog 3-400 times
- Try and run rebuild database in ephpod but there are files with no ID3 tags and meaningless names
- Decide to flatten and reload the iPod
- Ephpod points me at iTunes. iTunes takes 45 minutes to start up because it says it's "verifying media store"
- iTunes started so it's time to flatten the iPod. The option is helpfully called "restore" when "restore" is really not what it does! Actually it reloads the firmware, sets all settings to default and flattens the disk.
- Reset all the customisations I'd done on the iPod like shortening menus and turning off the clicker
- Fire up sharepod and start copying the library. "you have asked to sync 21,000 files, this may take several hours". The sync fails after 1000 or so.
- Go back 3 steps and flatten the ipod again. Start copying files a letter at a time.
Somewhere in here, I had a look at the wikipedia page on alternatives to iTunes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_managers What a mess! Apple keeps changing the rules. Commercial apps like Winamp don't or can't keep up so support for the Touch and iPhone is often lacking. The free tools are incomplete or buggy. The official tools like iTunes have a bunch of horrible quirks.
So:-
- If an iPod gets screwed in even a small, minor way, there seems to be no real alternative to flattening it and reloading everything. This takes a
long time.
- None of the management softwares including iTunes can really cope with
big libraries
- Apple really doesn't want or like any 3rd parties using the iPod at all, at all.
- iTunes on Windows still sucks. I'm led to believe iTunes on Mac sucks nearly as badly. If you're quirky enough to be using something other than Windows or Mac, you're stuck with incomplete support.
- The iPod has some silly market share, but everyone hates this part of the process. We love the device, we universally hate the management software. We universally hate the way this moderately expensive bit of consumer bling is apparently a fundamentally broken, disposable item.