iPod
I left my birthday gift (from my boyfriend), a 30GB
iPod at his house on
the night of my birthday as we went out to dinner, and after a day
or so had passed he informed me that he had already loaded it up
with songs and was making full use of it. Finally after two weeks
of whining I managed to get it back home.
Knowing that getting this to work in linux might involve some
hoops, and me jumping through them, I decided to load it with my
music in Windows XP (on my roommate's computer).
First though the iTunes software would not run from the cdrom so I
had to download it. Then I had to set up
samba set up for her computer as all my
music lives on a linux box. It took a few tries with the windows
configuration wizards to get it to see the music but eventually I
prevailed.
Adding the music however was really slow as it was coming over the
network and ended up with me going to bed and leaving it downstairs
loading overnight. I then got up and went to the gym, and when I
got home my roommate had taken the iPod to work with her! :-) So
finally this evening all is well and I got a chance to actually use
it.
The iPod itself lives up to its famous billing, it feels sleek but
sturdy, not a cheap plastic product. The click wheel thingy is
reasonably intuitive and the menu's don't take long to get used to.
The sound is good although I am not sure what the proper way to
wear the ear-buds are. (they hurt my ears a little, I guess I am
not used to it) I would like more volume though. I have everything
maxed out and it doesn't seem all that loud. I am not sure if this
is to do with the music or what, because movie trailer are really
loud!
A few things still need clarification. I cannot skip through a
song, when a song is playing I can only adjust the volume or skip
to the next song, not advance into the current song to determine if
its something I want to hear at that moment.
Also I can't seem to browse whilst playing. I loaded about 6000
songs, and the first time I turned it on it was on song 60 or
something (My roommate had it all day) so I press next and it plays
song 61, this means it will play all the music in the order I
loaded them, or I am guessing in the order they last appeared in
iTunes. So no one usually listens to music like this and I looked
for a way to rearrange the music on the fly, but it appears all I
can do is shuffle the music randomly. It would be nice to be able
to see whats coming next and preempt it with something else, or to
simple browse for something else while listening to the current
song. Hopefully some of these wrinkles will be ironed out when I
actually read the manual.
I was impressed with the video quality, and if I had to spend a
long time in some waiting room or even on a plane or bus, I could
easily watch a full movie on this. Podcast's now make sense to me,
something to kill time with when your not at home, I grabbed some
really good ones from
the
CBC.
So all in all I am very happy and now have to look into either
running iTunes in linux with wine, or finding a native linux
alternative like gtkpod or banshee or hoping that apple release a
linux version. (google did after all come through for me with
google earth, so now it apple's turn to step up and make me a happy
little camper.)