News Apple updates iPod range, releases iTunes 8

New iTunes = good

Genius?? Bad?

I want to turn it on to look, but don't want to send stupid details to Apple. Gah

 

I'm going to agree with M_D_K here.
I've had several different players, Creative, Samsung, Sony, Rio and not one of them was a nice for me as the iPod in terms of usability.
iTunes works for me with little effort and the hardware also looks pretty nice which is a bonus.

Sure some people buy them without knowing the alternatives but loads of us also buy them through choice.

M_D_K: I am also seriously tempted by a Nano, don't really need it but its within impulse buy range

 

Downgrading the classic to 120GB? God damnit that's Apple doing their best to destroy the one thing they had going for them, a relatively cheap very high capacity mp3 player. I've got an 80GB classic (birthday present, woo yeah!) and it's great. I'd happily buy something which is exactly the same in a few years time but that had an even larger drive capacity (say, 300GB, or even just 250GB). That Apple seem to think people are running out of stuff to stick on their Ipods is stupid and it blows.

 

The problem is (if you actually take some time to watch the key note) is that they want to use single platter drives only to keep the profile down. As soon as you go for larger sizes you get thicker units and it doesn't make enough sales to make financial sense to keep running a barely purchased SKU.

 

Same, I'm definitely picking up one of the yellow nanos soon enough.

I for the most part quite like iTunes 8, but the new grid view totally breaks playlists I suppose it'll get addressed in 8.0.1. Genius is OK, and it sounds like it should get better over time as its database grows. No opinion on the visualizer really, as I only have iTunes as my front app if I'm watching video in it.

edit - spec, you should really look into playlists sometime

 

Not much mention of iTunes 8 in this, eh? I'm liking it so far. The Genius playlists are like Pandora but with your music.

If you're interested, I wrote a little review of iTunes 8. Thankfully somebody else discovered how to turn off genre when browsing!

 

I think the iPod line is the one thing apple got right

It can be used as an external disc, it works usually without hassle, there are plenty of media center alternatives that support it (Jriver, amarok, etc), and it is well supported in peripherals and by the company that designed it.

true, it doesn't do a hundred snazzy different things, but it does what it was designed to do, and does it well, for a decent price (if its a classic, the touch and nano are still overpriced IMHO)

 

i don't if it's just me but didn't bit-tech post a news article a while back about leaked ipod nano pics? (maybe it was a different site but i can't remember very clearly). anyways i remember all of the initial reactions being rather negative. how ugly it looked but now everyone loves the look ?

on another note, i'm definitely not going to be buying any ipod for a long long time. not 'till a proper addition such as bluetooth, for example, instead of trivial crap like an accelerometer (i sense they added it mainly for games).
also, someone needs to slap apple for making customers pay for friggin' software updates which is complete toss.

 

I think all the Nanos have been ugly since the 2nd gen. This one looks like a Pop-Tart.

Does anyone know of a music player based around a 2.5" hard drive? Preferably user-upgradable.

 

I think I prefered the look of the shorter nano.

The battery died on my 80gb classic last week, so looks like I'll either have to try and get the battery changed out or replace it.
Although I said I would never get one (this was given to me as a present), I did find the ipod handy because I had an alpine car radio with an ipod adapter which let me use the ipod as a very small disc changer.

 

*An Ipod from my point of view to clarify

My desktop is my main music holding machine.. I tunes inconveniently doesn't include a very easy way to sync your purchases made on multiple computers, say my desktop and laptop. Well, one day I had a very bad thing happen to a striped raid.

No worries I thought, my nano has the music from both my laptop and desktop, I'll just restore my desktop from the Nano. *That seemed like a reasonable assumption at the time, I paid for the music, it includes my key from my account*

WRONG! Turns out a patch/update in Itunes made that impossible... so having exhausted any legal way to recover the music I paid for.. it was time to google.. I thought I found a nifty little program that would pull my music from the nano and restore it to my HDD.. nope... use of that software borked the nano and forced a factory reset, afterwords... no music left on the Nano.. $40+ worth of songs.. gone. (imagine a larger library.. maybe hundreds of $$$)

THE REASONS why my music I paid for was gone?
1. Have to burn a CD with Itunes to back up, cant just use a flash drive.. what a pain in the ass. So far the only way I know how to copy from one computer to another my library is to Zip it, then unzip it on desired computer. A ^$^#&*# pointless workaround.
2. Cant pull music placed on Ipod back to PC
3.Itunes / Ipod are a closed system!

So.. in ending to put out those flames..

I'm not saying the ipod is a device that doesn't PLAY music and videos very well, but that's its got a death grip on your files and wont let go because Apple said so.

should you have the need or desire to copy your Ipod's music library to another of your computers.. no can do.. something the open competition has been doing for years. It boggles me that Apple is creating a device that is limited in this way.. After all.. the music still has its DRM, only computers authorized can play them anyway..

So.. get a clue.. and some appreciation for the competition.

I certainly have!

 

-EVRE-: Welcome to DRM hell! DRM is all about punishing the buying costumer, because pirates aren't bothered by these problems. It's a real shame, since it's destroying the online market. I wouldn't blame Apple for that, but the music industry. These problems excists on oner platforms as well.

I have the 2nd gen Nano, but the "next" button is starting to tirre out. The new Nano looks pretty cool though. Ooh shiny... colours...

 

As far as I was aware, when you buy music on iTunes it's only a case of whacking in your apple ID and checking for purchases on iTunes? It's all I had to do when I lost my PC based iTunes (I buy most of my music on the Mac, since the iPod syncs to it).

 

1. yeah, that's silly. but surely you are able to re-download the music off iTunes once you enter your account details. i always do that with AppStore apps.
2. actually you can. on PC, there's iPod player, used to put on my ipod shuffle's memory stick section. i can plug it in, run it and play (or copy if you want) all music on my shuffle through PC.
3. it's closed system because of DRM. if you don't want DRM, im sorry, only way is to pirate the music. (shame really, just like the DRMs on PC games destroying the platform)

the reason people buy iPods is because of the ease of use. no matter what little-known music onto it, it always gets the tags correct. i have a few very little known soft tunes for listening during study/office, and it gets all correct. i have used a few other cheap MP3 players that's like a memory stick, drag-drop and play. but it almost always never gets the tags correct, just displays filename. and its very hard to use.

 

I never said anything about the iTunes store, I hate the thing

my argument is that the Hardware works well, not the purchasing and key management system (thus why I listed alternative players)

in EVREs case, since it IS a striped raid, it would have been an excellent idea to simply copy the itunes music folder and library file to an external HDD, and use that to restore in the event of failure (not just for itunes, backups are simply good computer management)[I have done this myself after a failure last month, no issues]

also if you don't buy from the itunes store, but from somewhere like, say, amazon; the files come as raw .mp3 anyway, no ugly DRM.

 

1. I have tried that in the past, and all Itunes has done is say "All purchases have been downloaded for this account"
"Purchases can only be downloaded once. You can burn a CD, DVD, use shared folders on your local network to transfer them to another computer."

so.. if you bought say, 20 songs from 5 different artists of music you already have music from, imagine how fun its going to be trying to remember and figure out what directories to copy over flash drive or network. Like I said earlier, I zip the entire music directory (thats no small feat, takes my computer quite a while to compile all those gb...) on the other computer I decompress the files back, and any new files get placed automatically into the correct directories. My way of doing it saves me from having a TON of coaster DVD's every time a made a few purchases from Itunes.

2. That means taking my 4g ipod with 3.7g of music... =/ the math says I cant put much in it as a drive to copy the music. Unless it can read a figure out that garble of directories and cryptic names Itunes gives the music you put on it.

I really didnt care about Itunes DRM system until I found its stupid limitations, there should be no reason to garble the file names to make it impossible to copy from Ipod to desktop if the DRM data with my account name and password are still intact.. after all that should mean that only I can play the music, where ever it is stored.

Since I have been buying from pawn shops and Ebay the original disks, I have found alot of new music I like, all the tags are correct because they are all looked up on the online DB, any music I have from other sources, I have had VERY few not have correct tags read by my sony walkman.

soo.. I hope I'm educating a few of you people still buying from Itunes and thinking about a shiny new Ipod what the disadvantages are, and how crappy the system can be if you have more than one computer or have a data loss how frustrating the Apple system can be..

 

In fairness you could have simply copied the music on the Nano (using at as a USB drive), onto your PC and imported it into iTunes

 

gotta get me one of those new touches... runs to For Sale section to sell current 8Gb ipod touch

 

have you seen how the files are arranged and named on an Ipod? I have read the files in the ipod by browsing to them, even played them, but when a file is named WH34.m4p or whatever when its Maroon5 Wake up call, what good is that going to do me for hundreds of songs? have me rename and place in organize in proper directories them all?

your saying I tunes will import and make sense of a garbled mess it puts on the ipod if you tell it to import from the Ipod as a drive *F:\ or something?* and not inside the Itunes program?

Every time I have tried to copy music from Ipod to PC from inside Itunes I get the little circle cross telling me NO!!!

and as far as I'm aware, the Ipod will not play music inside the designated drive section, so why put the music there if the Ipod cant play it? its the same as putting it on my flash drive.

 

of course itunes won't let you copy inside the application itself, no media center I've used ever allows that.

what you need to do is "enable disk use" on the ipod (prior to the failure!!!), copy that music folder to the desktop, and then have itunes import the lot and organize it, then delete the copied folder and you should be fine.

as of now there is no way to recover playlist info, but gracenote CDDB and the tags should be able to help you get that back together.