toosigma

I recently caved to my ongoing desire to have a higher capacity MP3 player. I’ve been using a 1GB flash-based player since my Rio Karma died over a year ago, and I simply couldn’t get over the desire to have a larger selection of music readily available. My biggest original issue with the iPod (battery life) has been resolved, so I gave the player a whirl.

The Good

• The packaging has to be the most beautiful I’ve seen in a long time. It’s so attractive that I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to throw it away. Definitely a good start.
• The power-on time is phenomenal. I’m used to a player taking 3-15 seconds to start up, and the iPod blows everything out of the water with near instant gratification.
• The click-wheel is easily the best interface I’ve ever used - it’s also excellent from a longevity issue: most players I’ve owned have buttons for volume or scrolling - these buttons quickly wear out from constant use, reducing the overall lifetime of the player. The click-wheel replaces these functions by sliding your finger around the scroll wheel, saving “clicks” for actual selections.
• The shuffle functionality is good (but not quite perfect). I tend to memorize patterns without any real effort, and once a pattern is discerned, it annoys me to no end. Thus the ability of a player to break those patterns is paramount. There are several different methods of randomizing music:
  1. Choosing the next song randomly from a list - works, but the pseudo-random generator typically clusters around the same set of songs, generates the same playlist repeatedly, or simply fails to play some songs.
  2. Take the initial list and sort it randomly, playing through all the songs sequentially - this is the method used by the iPod, and manages to avoid repeating the same few songs, and it will eventually play through every song in the list.

  Unfortunately, the iPod seems to generate a new sort-order every time you switch away from the playlist. Thus if I’m listening to Playlist A, then stop to show a friend a neat video podcast I found, and return to Playlist A, it generates an entirely new sort-order, potentially leading to exactly the same sort of problems as the first method of randomization (unless I actively monitor myself to avoid switching playlists).

The Bad

• As listed above, the shuffle functionality could be better.
• The device didn’t come with a manual, so it took the better part of a week before I figured out how to rate songs using the iPod, and several other features are far from obvious given the interface. There is an online course you can take to learn about the various features, but I’m not sure the average user would find it.
• When connecting to the computer, the entire iTunes application tends to freeze until it finishes the detection of the iPod - this is more an annoyance, since all music sources are stopped.

The Ugly

I was originally concerned about the compatibility between Windows and the iPod, but numerous rave reviews convinced me to throw caution to the wind. Unfortunately, those reviews neglected the numerous issues that seem to crop up. When I first got the iPod, I installed the iPod and everything seemed to be working. However, the iPod would repeatedly attempt to syncronize with the iTunes library so long as it was connected, despite the fact that the library hadn’t changed in the 10-15 seconds since the previous sync. This made it extremely difficult to safely unplug the iPod from the computer, which was exacerbated by the fact that the “eject” button in iTunes seemed to have no effect. After several days, I noticed that the songs played on the iPod were not accurately updated in the iTunes library to reflect the number of times the song was played, which would have made that particular feature of iTunes practically worthless (since I listen to my portable about 3-4 times as much as I do to my computer). None of these little eccentricities was enough to turn me away, but they definitely cut into my zeal for the new toy.

The big issue came almost exactly one week after first connecting the iPod. I got a message that there was a corrupt Artwork database, and that I chould run chkdsk to correct the problem. I was a bit surprised, since I doubt that 95% of iPod users would have any idea what chkdsk was, let alone know how to run it. Still, I ran the check, fixed the problem, and restarted the sync process… which failed spectacularly after a few minutes. The iPod was reporting that it had used over 17G of disk space, but there were no songs on the player (17G happens to be the size of my non-archived music collection). Subsequent attempts to sync the iTunes library with the iPod merely filled the remaining ~11G of space with the same music, which was obviously unacceptable. I ran the iPod update utility in the hopes of reformatting the iPod so that I could use the full 30G of space that I’d paid for. Unfortunately, every attempt to run the utility ended in a “Firmware Update Failed: Disk Write Error”, and I couldn’t use the standard Windows format utilities because the utility had wiped out the iPod’s partition, leaving only a RAW disk.

I spent hours searching websites for a solution to this issue, and found dozens (if not hundreds) of fellow iPod users who had encountered similar problems, but not one with a viable solution. Several suggested trying a different computer, so I attempted to use my iPod with three different computers each with a different operating system: none of which yielded different results. After trying with my primary computer several more times, the system became incredibly unstable, crashing or locking up at random intervals. No amount of uninstalling and reinstalling of software would resolve the issue. Since a reinstall was overdue anyway (though the system had been rock-solid-stable until adding the iPod), I reinstalled Windows, only to have the same crash/lockup issues the moment I installed the iPod software. It was only after a second complete reinstall of the operating system that the iPod appears to have shed it’s quirks and is working more or less as intended.

Conclusion

At this point, I’m relatively pleased with the device, and barring any further trials and tribulations, I foresee a long and happy relationship with my first major Apple purchase. The design is definitely clean and incredibly user-friendly, and it’s easily one of the top two MP3 players (the other being my Rio Karma) I’ve ever used. I would unhesitatingly recommend it for any Mac owner, since I’ve never seen a technical issue from an all-Apple setup, but I’d warn any potential Windows user of the possibility for problems.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 3:01 pm and is filed under gadgets, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.