Rob Malpass wrote:
> Hi all
>
> Do any of us have ipods? If so, has anyone found any decent music
> library software for them?
> I migrated from a 20Gb IRiver to an 80Gb Apple ipod last year and in
> that time my 8500 40 odd Gb library has caused me no end of problems
> with itunes running under windows. This gives me 2 options:
>
> 1) The baby and the bathwater - get a new mp3 player and say farewell
> to apple and M$. In theory (cash permitting) I have no problem with
> this but...
I've owned an mp3 player since Creative's first Zen 'brick' (which I
believe came out at the same time as the first iPod), but I've yet to
own an iPod. The 20GB Zen did me fine for many years, but fell prey to
an upgrade when I decided I wanted to be able to play ogg vorbis files
on a machine that would play nice with Linux without workarounds. I
ended up with an iAudio X5 20GB which I have since upgraded to the 60GB
model running Rockbox [1]. I plug it in, my Linux PC sees it as a hard
drive and I transfer files back and forth to my heart's content.
> 2) I quite like the ipod itself (touch wood) I've had very little
> trouble with it. It's the software that's the problem. For
> example, you would think "import library" would be a pretty simple
> thing. In my case, for no apparent reason, it stops at 3300 songs.
My twins both have iPods and I can see why people like them, but I
personally couldn't be doing with iTunes or the faff that workarounds
inevitably come with. Neither of their machines (an iPod touch and an
iPod Classic) would place nice with Ubuntu Linux, so now they both use
Windows to upload songs, which is annoying as Ellen has to run VMWare
solely for this purpose, while Sam play games on Windows and therefore
has an XP instance that he can use.
>
> So if anyone knows of any better software - open source, bleeding
> edge, Linux or Windows - I'm not too worried - I just want it to do
> what itunes is supposed to do (which might be a pipe dream as I
> suspect the ipod is close source under the bonnet) - I'd love to hear
> from you.
No suggestions there I am afraid Rob, since Rockbox support for Apple
machines doesn't extend to the larger, newer models. My friend, who has
a both the latest Touch and Classic models, basically built his
listening around them and ended up getting a Mac Mini and a Time Capsule
to facilitate it. It's a great system, but it didn't come cheap!
My alternative suggestion would be to find a player that is unencumbered
by DRM, free of proprietary software and lets you play whatever file
formats you choose, managed through the OS of your choice. That said, I
am not sure what the options are these days and for that reason am now
looking to buy a decent X5 to act as backup should this one fail.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, they appear to be holding their value at the moment.
Sean
[1]
http://www.rockbox.org/ [Rockbox is an open source firmware for mp3
players, written from scratch.]
--
And I've made disapointment
My very best friend
[Anton Newcombe - Straight Up And Down]
