Ipod’s weakness
Here's the thing. Ipod's are great for people who are content with things the way others dictate they should be. iTunes is great if you are just happy with things and will just adapt to how things are offered to you. I'm not happy with how things are offered to me and I try to change things to suit my needs. iTunes is great for buying music, even if it's DRM licensing thingo sucks. But I wouldn't let iTunes manage either my ipod or my music collection, no *freaking* way! My emphasis on making sure you know how much I hate iTunes' "management" skills is because it has completely wiped my ipod of all files on several occasions. Something I do not take lightly.
So, because of this, I started looking for an alternative to iTunes for transferring files to my ipod and I found anapod explorer. Now, while most reviews will tell you its terrible and dont touch anapod software, I found it quite good (while it still has several problems, the main one for me is crashing when I am editing my file tags). But the problem here is that it is commercial and I connect my ipod to several machines and damned if I am going to spend $20 on each machine. So, I tried Floola. Yikes. Lets just say that when I left work yesterday after using Floola, most of my music was missing and the music that wasn't missing had incorrect album art and the file names were matched to the wrong files. So Floola is up there with iTunes for trying to ruin my ipod experience.
Then I thought, hang on, why should I need software just to transfer music to my iPod? I should just be able to drag and drop music onto it. So, I bit the bullet and installed Rockbox. Any reservations about Rockbox that I had previously went out the window. It was a breeze to install, it has 100x the functionality of a normal iPod (eg editing music, tags etc on the ipod.) and it stores music in normal files in a normal structure, so you can just drag and drop music onto it. And, as a doubley good feature, it dual-boots with the standard iPod firmware, so it will still work in my Alpine integration box in my car (to play the ipod through my Alpine touch screen).
Rockbox is certainly the business and I recommend it to anybody. No more middle-man software just to use my ipod on multiple machines.
Now I just need to remove the DRM on the music I bought...
No related posts.