IPod as a player, it looks good, the quality of music is excellent.
I don’t have much complaints against the player, but against the way you make the player to work.
This is more to do with the list of instructions they need to provide along with the player, if possible an installation CD.
The price I paid to enjoy it was not just a financial price, but a lot more.
I am not sure whether every body had the same problem like me, I wish to share this information to some one who is facing the same issues which I had faced.
Ever since 2004, I wanted to buy an iPod, but finanly settled for an inexpensive player, which was a sandisk player, which I paid some$50+, which can play from an AA battery, where you don’t need any software to copy songs, on top of it it had an FM player and voice recorder.
It can play wma format, which I prefer as it is some times 1/4 of the normal mp3 format file size.
Only disadvantage it had was it was had only 1 GB memory apart from not being having the "Apple" branding.
This summer the fate had smiled on me. I love both movies and music, I have a huge database full of downloaded movies mostly avi, which I found a hard timing in maintaining them, I did not enjoying cutting DVDs, so I thought of buying an external hard disk.
While doing an analysis on buying a external hard disk, I thought of going for an 160 GB iPod!
When I got my apple, I could not find any user manual or a driver CD, instead I found just a small note, which I ignored.
I happily connected my iPod to my computer and started dragging files into it, after I unplugging I was shocked to see that it did not show the files I had copied, it was then I found out the bitter truth that insignificant note that iPod requires a Software called iTunes. It was a ritual to have iTunes to initalize the iPod.
I was using a Windows 2000 professional, the version of iTunes I downloaded did not install on the that platform, after doing some search I found that there was an older version of iPod which will run on a W2K, I downloaded that but found out that it required Windows service pack 4, again I downloaded that too and finally got the iTune installed. But my woes did not end at that point of time, my version of iPod would require a newer version of iTunes which requires windows XP.
I took this as a challenge and bunked the office next day, I formated my computer and installed windows XP. This time I could install iTunes, it was hard to belive that iTunes was developed and maintained apple, it was a lousy/insane software, which I had every reason to belive that it was written by a rival to Apple.
I found out that I had no use with iTunes, so I searched and got a list of some 20 odd third party iPod managers, I started evaluating one by one. Out of which I found that ml_Pod, which is a WinAmp plugin did the job perfectly well, I could copy the music files with ease now.
Now I found out the second truth that iPod does not support wma, avi formats, I downloaded a third party software that does a conversion of avi to mp4. The conversion takes more time that downloading the file of that size from the internet. After all these drill I lost the the idea/interest of storing the movies at all.
Finally in the process of making the iPod work, I had rebuilt my system, downloaded around 550 MB of software, lost two productive days in doing the evaluation of the Junk softwares. On Top of all these, I lost the interest in music and movies.
Before buying an iPod think twice.
Regards
Shyam