ipod

[Illusional]

ok, so as i was saying, i just bought my ipod this week. i guess i didn't really read the reviews on it, but hey, i need some music around me when i'm on a trip so i just f*ck it and bought it.

first... all the directions on how to use the ipod are online. thus, they are very broad and you have to basically look in other forums, (shhh don't tell LA that i did this), but yeah, you have to search the internet on how to use the damn thing. with all the different things that you can do with this, you have to read a damn novel and i hate reading.

another thing.. so the only way that you can charge your ipod is though the usb port on your computer. oh great, does that mean my ipod will die somewhere in the middle of my trip?? hell no, for about 40-50 bucks more, you can buy the portable charger... i tell you apple ripping me off, yet i can't complain.

anyone else care to share some information with me on basic ipod bullshit??

raverboy

[vashti]

You can transfer your CDs to your iPod or buy music from iTunes, and your earphones will probbaly be the first thing to go. That's all I can tell you.

[Michael6084]

thats wierd. i got a charger for an electrical outlet and a usb cable with my ipod. i actually bought two and my second one is a video ipod.

as far as how to use it, i found it rather easy, like uploading music and stuff. using itunes, put in cds and upload the music onto itunes, and then upload the music onto the ipod.

maybe im just different. i play around with stuff in order to find out how to use them. other specific ways, i have to look up.

[Tiay]

as far as I know, apple used to include both a usb and a regular ol' electrical socket charging cable. But they don't anymore.. yes that's kinda lame I guess but I don't mind because I prefer not paying for a piece of plastic that I wont use anyway. consumerism has gone too far. You don't need an egg slicer. You don't need five different attachments for your vacuum cleaner. You don't need an entire cupboard filled with little plastic extras that came with various appliances and gadgets which you can now no longer match up. ****rant!****

And how long is your trip? My ipod nano lasts for the better part of a week before I need to charge it. and unless you're trip involves a first class plane ticket with sockets, the charger would be useless anyway.

and where's all this novel-length ipod documentation? what kinda extra features are you looking at? I don't get it. all you need is itunes running on your computer with your music on it... Plug in the ipod. hit sync. wait. hit eject. put earbuds in your ears, checking that the other end of the cable is plugged into the audio outpot on the ipod. Hit play (the button with the ">" shape, located at the bottom of the scroll wheel) and enjoy. What more do you want? For crying out loud, I already have a beef with apple for making their products too simple and "dumbed down". how much easier can it get?

edit: ok, apologies for patronising tone, but dude, my mom uses an ipod, and that's saying something!

[lin]

I got both chargers with mine .

Ipod headphones are terrible , just loud and tinny and yes they will blow almost instantly . I swapped mine for Sennheiser mx500's . They sound a lot better and are dirt cheap ( I get mine off amazon ).

I've only ever had one ipod . I've stuck with Creative ever since . It's easier to just drag and drop files onto Creative mp3 players without having to use an actual media player ( unless I missed some neat ipod trick and was doing it the difficult way for 2 years ! ). Mine was an ipod mini . It was easy enough to put music on when there was still space on it . I found it a lot more awkward to take a couple of cd's off to replace them with new ones . My ipod kept wanting to "choose" which new stuff to put on . I found it pretty tricky to get the media player to let me put my actual choice on . It seemed to take a lot of ticking and unticking boxes on itunes and trying to get itunes off auto update . If you don't have a massive music collection this will probably never be a problem .

I had a problem once aswell when I updated itunes . It didn't download properly and I couldn't get it to work until the new itunes was released several months later . I had to use Real Player instead .

I never bought from the itunes store after finding out that the files are locked to try and stop you sharing your music with other people . If you send the files to somebody elses computer they can only enter the file if they know your pass word . Plus itunes uses the ipod format which isn't compatible with most other mp3 players . I tend to have all my music on actual mp3 ( the files take up more room but they are universally compatible with any player ). Itunes uses the ipod format as a default setting . You can change it to mp3 . I changed mine to mp3 , 192 bit rate . I got a lot less on my ipod but the sound quality was very good and when I swapped to a Creative player I had no problems transferring my music to it .

I sound like I'm being negative about ipods . I loved it when it was the only player I'd ever owned . It was used everyday for a couple of years ( it never broke , the battery eventually died ) . I've just found that Creative sound at least as good and more simple to use .

Oh yeah .. the battery life on my ipod was terrible , but it was an old ipod mini . I never got more than 5 hours out of it . My friend had a Creative Zen at the same time and it did about 18 hours .

Er .... that's just my experience lol

[Tiay]

I got both chargers with mine .

probably a few years back? I don't think they do it anymore.

Ipod headphones are terrible , just loud and tinny and yes they will blow almost instantly . I swapped mine for Sennheiser mx500's . They sound a lot better and are dirt cheap ( I get mine off amazon ).

yup ipod earbuds are pretty basic. Used mine every day for at least a year and they didn't blow. They just started looking really scabby.

I've only ever had one ipod . I've stuck with Creative ever since . It's easier to just drag and drop files onto Creative mp3 players without having to use an actual media player ( unless I missed some neat ipod trick and was doing it the difficult way for 2 years ! ). Mine was an ipod mini . It was easy enough to put music on when there was still space on it . I found it a lot more awkward to take a couple of cd's off to replace them with new ones . My ipod kept wanting to "choose" which new stuff to put on . I found it pretty tricky to get the media player to let me put my actual choice on . It seemed to take a lot of ticking and unticking boxes on itunes and trying to get itunes off auto update . If you don't have a massive music collection this will probably never be a problem .

hmm, interesting question.
I had the same issue with my old ipod- it was only 2gb and I have about 3gb of music/podcasts/videos. I just made a playlist and set that as the ipod list, and then just dragged in or deleted from it the stuff I wanted on the ipod- which pretty much leaves you doing the same type of thing as you do with the creative, only in itunes. Y'know I think actually if you mount the ipod as a disk, there's simply a "music" folder in there that you can just drag files into, but, I don't know if this really works because I never had a reason to try!

I had a problem once aswell when I updated itunes . It didn't download properly and I couldn't get it to work until the new itunes was released several months later . I had to use Real Player instead .

yikes, that sucks. did you try downloading it again from the apple site?

I never bought from the itunes store after finding out that the files are locked to try and stop you sharing your music with other people . If you send the files to somebody elses computer they can only enter the file if they know your pass word .

grr, stupid Digital Rights Management. I think the music industry is going to die a slow death. They are no longer needed. Actually, some songs on the iTunes store are not protected like this, and you can tell before you buy them.

Plus itunes uses the ipod format which isn't compatible with most other mp3 players . I tend to have all my music on actual mp3 ( the files take up more room but they are universally compatible with any player ). Itunes uses the ipod format as a default setting . You can change it to mp3 . I changed mine to mp3 , 192 bit rate . I got a lot less on my ipod but the sound quality was very good and when I swapped to a Creative player I had no problems transferring my music to it .

heh, you're giving apple too much credit. There is no ipod format. It's simply .mp4, it's smaller and better than mp3, and it's an open format. All kinds of devices support it.

I sound like I'm being negative about ipods . I loved it when it was the only player I'd ever owned . It was used everyday for a couple of years ( it never broke , the battery eventually died ) . I've just found that Creative sound at least as good and more simple to use .

Oh yeah .. the battery life on my ipod was terrible , but it was an old ipod mini . I never got more than 5 hours out of it . My friend had a Creative Zen at the same time and it did about 18 hours .

Er .... that's just my experience lol

I bet the creative was bigger than the mini, and/or more expensive, and/or from a different time, as you mentioned, which isn't really a fair comparison.
well, anyways, we just have different experiences, but I thought i'd put my 2 cents in.

[Junket]

DON'T BUY MUSIC OFF OF iTUNES!

It's a ripoff and even though you're paying for it, it's not fully yours to do what you want as you wish. It's still "protected" by apple as if they still own the shit.

[lin]

Tiay , you're probably right about all of the technical stuff lol . At the time it was my first player so I made a lot of mistakes with it .
The itunes update thing was actually from the itunes site and it wouldn't let me remove it and update again until the new version came out . It wasn't the end of the world , just a pain .

My friend had his Creative player when I had my ipod . It was a similar price but had a bigger memory and a much bigger battery life . I think that old ipods had a bad reputation for battery life . Mine never even managed the battery life it claimed to have , not even when it was new . It stopped working in cold weather aswell ( I'm only in England , winter is pretty mild here ) . It used to stop working and said that the battery was dead if it was cold enough to see my breath . That's probably just because it was an old model aswell though .

[Illusional]

ok to comment on the charger. well i only got the usb cable that you plug into your computer. tiay, i'm going to japan for about two weeks and i know the ipod is no energizer bunny. this little piece of shit will get i think about 24 hours of music play and then it's ded.. yes, D E D, dead.

haha... when it comes to the directions part, yes it's pretty simple. you download itunes and it will automatically transfer your entire music/video collection onto itself, then you can hit "sync" and boom, it's all supposedly on your ipod. well... this is where i had to look up the directions online because i wanted things to be different.

first, i had to change the format of my porn..err i mean videos because it wasn't supported by the ipod. oh j/k... well i have a lot of music videos that i uploaded and in order to successfully watch them on my ipod, research had to be done to learn how and what will do this conversion for me.

my second "bitching" part was referring to the organization of the music and videos. it's great that you can locate you songs by either title, artists, album and so forth.. but this is the part that got me. there are two/three options in which you can set up your ipod to sync your music. i think that i've finally figured out that if you choose manual, each time you upload your songs, yes they will be out of order meaning non-alphabetically. this mainly refers to the videos and music section which does take up a rather large space on my computer.

i guess bottom line, what i win in some sections, i also loose in others. after paying 350 for this little thing, i would've expected some head too, but i guess i was asking too much, just like a first date. well i have a little over a month to upload all my shit and get ready for my trip... whoo whooooooooo

ps... all the little details about fine tuning itunes and the oipod on all the apple site tiay.

raverboy

[Tiay]

DON'T BUY MUSIC OFF OF iTUNES!

It's a ripoff and even though you're paying for it, it's not fully yours to do what you want as you wish. It's still "protected" by apple as if they still own the shit.

yeah, DRM sucks. And the more they do it, the more people are going to learn how to download music for free. People who would've otherwise been happy to pay for it: The music industry is shooting themselves in the foot. Apple did not want to put DRM on the itunes store files, btw. In the good old days iTunes could share songs over the net with other iTunes users- now it can only stream over the local network, and you can't copy songs anymore. All this is on the insistence (and threats) of the music industry, not apple.

I'm told about one third of the songs on the itunes store are not protected (presumably these are songs from independent artists?) though I have never checked this so don't quote me.

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I think that old ipods had a bad reputation for battery life . Mine never even managed the battery life it claimed to have , not even when it was new . It stopped working in cold weather aswell ( I'm only in England , winter is pretty mild here ) . It used to stop working and said that the battery was dead if it was cold enough to see my breath . That's probably just because it was an old model aswell though .

well, at the time apple made the ipod mini, they should've been in the mp3 player game long enough not to screw things up!

I've had SLR cameras die on me in the cold - and i'm in ireland, so it's also pretty mild. All batteries loose (or decrease) the ability to give energy in the cold, it has something to do with the internal chemical reactions.. or something. I knew it once

the way battery life is estimated (for pretty much any device that runs on batteries) is for "best case scenario conditions". This usually requires that your files are at 128kps, you're not wearing big headphones, you don't have the volume up, you have the backlight set to turn itself off automatically, there are no DSP settings (like 'sound check' on ipods), you dont' view photos/videos, you don't use the equaliser, etc, etc.

a lot of people aren't aware that if you mistreat your battery a few times, it will be significantly and permanently damaged. Like not following instructions when you first get the device, or leaving it discharged for long time (if you wanted to kill a battery, that's how you'd do it).

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ok to comment on the charger. well i only got the usb cable that you plug into your computer. tiay, i'm going to japan for about two weeks and i know the ipod is no energizer bunny. this little piece of shit will get i think about 24 hours of music play and then it's ded.. yes, D E D, dead.

oh god, I didn't realise people still existed that didn't travel with their laptops. oops
well, in that case you probably have to buy the charger. However, try looking on ebay or amazon- they will probably have either a much cheaper charger, or even one that runs on standard batteries (such as AA) so that you can charge even if the Japanese sockets/voltage are different. It should be less than ten bucks.
You might be best off getting a simple universal USB charger- that way you can charge other usb devices in the future without having to buy another damn cable.

for instance:
universal usb charger: brookstone.com/sl/product/4251-usb-charger-adapter.html
ipod charger that runs on AA's: 1powershop.com/en/audio-multimedia/aa-emergency-battery-charger-for-ipod-mini-nano-video.html

haha... when it comes to the directions part, yes it's pretty simple. you download itunes and it will automatically transfer your entire music/video collection onto itself, then you can hit "sync" and boom, it's all supposedly on your ipod. well... this is where i had to look up the directions online because i wanted things to be different.

first, i had to change the format of my porn..err i mean videos because it wasn't supported by the ipod. oh j/k... well i have a lot of music videos that i uploaded and in order to successfully watch them on my ipod, research had to be done to learn how and what will do this conversion for me.

oh yeah, had the same problem. There's a great app out called isquint which is free, and which converts videos to be playable on ipods.

my second "bitching" part was referring to the organization of the music and videos. it's great that you can locate you songs by either title, artists, album and so forth.. but this is the part that got me. there are two/three options in which you can set up your ipod to sync your music. i think that i've finally figured out that if you choose manual, each time you upload your songs, yes they will be out of order meaning non-alphabetically. this mainly refers to the videos and music section which does take up a rather large space on my computer.

I've never seen the point of having my ipod on manual, so I don't know what that's about. I know you can change the movie type of a file to "music video" (select video, get info, go to video tab, change video kind popup) but i'm not sure that'd address your issue. If I were you i'd email apple, or submit feedback on itunes.. after all, they can't change it if they don't know about it.

best of luck getting it all to work

[Illusional]

yeah i don't have a laptop. but if i had one, i personally wouldn't want to take it along when i go on a vacation. sure it's great for movies and songs, but if i''m on a vacation to a different country, then i'd be too busy to even bother with my laptop.

as for the cable.. thanks, i'll do some "research" on ebay and probably one a cheap one.

as lastly the manual portion of the ipod. well basically i have all my music on my external hardrive just in case my HD crashes again. like i said, i have over 100 gigs of music and i don't really want that on my regular HD. i'm guessing with a manual sync, i would be able to keep my a copy of my music on my ipod without having it on itunes, and thus it won't crowd my computer.

ok with that last thought in mind, so is there a way where i could do that?? in the automatic sync program, itunes is a mirror or your ipod correct?? so with a manual program, i would keep all my songs on my ipod and then delete them from the computer. but you see, the only problem is that when you automatically upload everything bit by bit or day by day, nothing is really organized. it's like throwing everything into one file and scrolling through my folder, hoping that i will find it before i get irritated with the ipod. suggestions...??

raverboy

[Junket]

I still buy my CD albums. This way, I can do whatever the hell I want with it.

[Tiay]

hmm, let me get this straight:

your situation is, you have 100gb of music on your external drive, and less on your regular HD. You could sync your iTunes (with just the music from the regular HD) with the ipod, but then you'd be missing a lot of your music.

that's a tricky one. I've never used manual, but I was under the impression that it merely allowed you to select your songs from your itunes library more selectively- not drag in files from another mounted disk. Though, I guess, since manual mode requires disk use, you can try just dragging in files there. I think this is going to require a little experimentation.

I'll look into it more later, but now it's 3 AM and I should go to sleep...


oh, more importantly though, how on earth did you amass 100gb of music?

[Illusional]

haha experimentation is the key. i'm not leaving for another 7 weeks so i picked up my ipod early so i could play with it and fill it up before my trip.

as for the 100 gig... it all came from my friend. my computer actually crashed a while back and he filled my external hardrive with a lot of trance... most of which i still have to sort through.

within the external hd, there is a way to load music from it and transfer it to the ipod. i'm only hoping that it doesn't take up all the space on my regular hd. but as i play with this and find out more info, i will keep you updated.

raverboy

[Tiay]

ah, I see, heh. do you really listen to all that music? I find it hard to imagine. Well, still, it should be possible to do that, the problem seems kind of silly but it remains unsolved none the less. hm. I guess you could install an operating system on the external disk, boot it up install itunes on it, lol. but that's such a sucky, round-a-bout "solution".
it seems that in the process of making things simple, apple also makes things hard- ie, if you don't want to do it the pre-defied easy way, it's suddenly really hard. I don't like it.