iPod
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
My handy little Samsung MP3 player (a YP-MT6) is a simple affair, with controls that are easy to use and no complications of any kind. Its one weakness is the battery door, which I could tell from the start wasn't going to be entirely up to the job. Sure enough, it slowly began to crack because the strain of simply containing a spring-held AA battery was too much for it.
The first fall from my desk at work (after two and half years) was all it took to break that cracked dooor. I responded by holding it together with tape and elastic bands. This:
a) didn't entirely work
b) limited access to the controls
c) looked ridiculous
So my wife suggested that I use her iPod, which she hasn't been using. I was reluctant, because:
a) you can't just drag and drop files to the iPod, you have to use iTunes
b) iTunes on Windows is slow, strange and does things I don't like (contacting the Internet, converting files at random to the aac music format, crashing my PC, etc)
c) the wheel interface, quite frankly, is far more sexy than it is practical
d) you have to charge the thing via a USB cable
e) when you connect the iPod to your computer, iTunes wakes up and takes control of the iPod
I could live with the wheel interface, and while I detested iTunes and its hour and a half of added workflow, it could at least be made to do the job. But it was the last two that caused me to abruptly and permanently stop using the iPod.
I simply wanted to play a song for my wife from the iPod onto our sound system. Noticing that the battery was low, I plugged in the USB connection. The music suddenly stopped, and the interface to the iPod locked up. Turning to my PC, I saw that iTunes was hung up trying to connect to the Internet again for some reason. I stopped it from doing so, and iTunes went into a funk. I could not "eject" the iPod to take control of it again, nor could I use the iPod itself to disengage. When I finally got through it all and had the iPod free of the PC again, I found that it had reset to the start, and that I'd have to skip forward through a hundred songs to find the Debussy song I wanted to play.
This came at the end of a long and difficult week at work, and I was in no mood for fighting with an MP3 player. The last bit of my energy for the week, rekindled by the music, was now gone.
As I write this, two days later, I'm stilled appalled. I've since thought back to all the things that the iPod seems to expect of a user. That they love the iTunes way of doing things, for instance. Or that they wouldn't want to be able to delete a song from the thing while playing music (there seems to be no way of doing this common task). Or that I might not want my MP3 player (and PC hard drive) loaded up with thumbnail images of the album cover of the music I'm listening to (apparently one of the reasons that iTunes was going to the Internet).
Apparently the good folk at Apple think they know better than I do how I want to use an MP3 player, and their way is the only way to do things. Reminds me distinctly of Microsoft, and that's not a flattering comparison.
So I'm going to buy another MP3 player rather than use the iPod that my wife won.