I finally broke down and bought an ipod for my birthday. Too many people compared owning one to meeting the Baby Jesus for me to refuse any longer. Plus the headphone jack on my laptop doesn't work quite like it should and last time I sent it in the Best Buy people were clueless. Anyhow, though the ipod is a neat piece of hardware, Apple BLOWS. Firstly, check out that pretentious bag. LAME!!! What you can't tell from my friend Anne modeling it is that it's made from this ultra soft fancy platic that makes me want to vomit because it's so lame. And don't even get me started on the boutique that is an Apple store.
The worst offense, however, is that Apple forces you to use itunes to transfer music over to your player. It's pretty obviously a bald faced attempt to get you to buy music from the online itunes store, which it takes you to if you ever so slightly click in the wrong place, but what's worse is that it's a terrible way to organize your music. I, as I'm sure many people do, have many MP3s which have inconsistent ID3 tags, which for the non-nerds out there means that the file names and some of the other aspects which the computer uses to categorize them, don't follow one system. Some, for instance are grouped by album, so they are in a folder named for the album and are named by song, but don't include all the information about album and artist on each individual file. Part of the tags is genre, which was all over the place. The long and short of this is that I spent the better part of yesterday trying to get my twelve hundred MP3s into a unified system of tags. This, of course, could have been avoided if the ipod showed up as a portable hard drive and I was able to simply move folders over as they appeared in my Windows directory, but, again, this wouldn't force the joy of itunes on me. Screw you Apple for stealing my day. I love my ipod.
4 comments:
November or December of last year, I got sick of the crappy bugginess of Winamp 3 and switched over to iTunes at my then-flatmate's suggestion (he is, incidentally, an Apple acolyte). Fixing all the broken tags was a bit of a chore, but iTunes makes it way easier -- you can edit tags in the main window, or highlight a bunch of songs and edit all their tags at once -- than Winamp or Windows -- where you have to bring up the properties pane for each file, one at a time. And then putting together playlists across different directories was easy.
The built-in iTunes store searches are annoying -- and you can turn off store access under preferences -- as is the fact that you were forced to organize things on your computer the way they were on the iPod. But I still prefer the iTunes player over craptacular Real Jukebox or Winamp.
Yeah, Winamp 3 sucks, which is why i went back to Winamp 2. And yes, once I'd fixed all the tags in itunes it's nice, it's just a chore to do that you don't have to do in various Windows programs like Winamp because you can just drag and drop the files into segregated folders. Sure, the tags aren't fixed, but the songs are grouped the way I want them to be, which is all that I really care about. I avoided buying this ipod both because I have this thing about paying rent I have to do and because Apple is so pretentious it drives me crazy. Just being in that store made me want to slap someone. Unfortunately nobody else seems to be able to make an mp3 player as well as Apple has. Curse them!
Yeah, what Deef said.
And you don't even have to use iTunes to transfer songs if you don't want to. When I got my first iPod, I used a handy little program called EphPod. It does the job extroardinarily well - and this was almost two years ago. I'm sure it's working much better now.
Yeah, now that I've had the thing for a week and fixed all my tunes it's all good. And really, it's only the tunes you download off the internet that are a pain because their id tags are fucked. If you're a good person and only listen to mp3s ripped from your cds it's not really a problem.
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