Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on ipod http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic ipod Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Happy Happy Joy Joy Tue, 03 May 2005 10:10:32 +0100 So yesterday I bought a 20GB iPod. I haven't had a decent MP3 player since about 2001. The last couple of years I've made do with an MP3 CD player which was fine for car trips but too cumbersome for walkabouts. CD shuffling was a PITA too. What pushed me over the edge was Beth's <a href="http://bethlet.net/catacombs/000713.html">SpeedyPod</a> nestled in it's funky speakerdock turning it into a portable stereo. I realised I had waited too long. I also realised I could afford it which, after a couple of years of being broke, took me a little time to get to grips with. I'm using Windows so I expected a little roughness around the edges. It took me a few goes to get iTunes to recognize the iPod was present via USB-2 despite it appearing as a drive letter in explorer. I ended up downloading the 2005-03-23 updater and reflashing it and, although that didn't seem to make any difference at the time, a couple of reboots later all seemed well. Seemed well. I'm not the hugest iTunes fan but I'm getting used to it again and it does have one of the best music browsing interfaces i've come across. Smart playlists are also handy. Of course I am now having to fix the ID3 tags on a huge pile of files. Oh well. Anyway with the iPod recognized and a library of music on hand it was time to go crazy and fill it up. That's when something bad happened... I keep most of my MP3s on a 120GB USB-2 external drive. This has been working great for about 5-6 months. In the process of copying some music over to the pod there was a momentary glitch. After that I seemed unable to copy anything more. iTunes would do the copy, you could see the files being copied, only they didn't appear on the iPod either in iTunes itself or browsing the hidden folders on the iPod disk. All that was visible were the couple of dozen tracks which copied first time. Shortly thereafter I got a "delayed write failure" error on my USB-2 drive which began to behave a little odd and then wouldn't unmount. I rebooted. The drive seemed fine, all data present and correct. I tried again but now iTunes would not copy anything to the iPod at all. I did a factory restore on the ipod (and am now stuck with it called IPOD because I can't see how to change the name). No deal. Then I got another delayed write failure on the USB-2 drive. Now I was getting a little jumpy. I keep all my data backups on that drive. Then, worse, the drive started reporting device failure when I plugged it in. I had a terrible sinking feeling. A complete reboot did nothing to buoy me up. Feeling panic brought on by data loss to be imminent I powered everything off and moved the USB-2 drive back to my laptop. With a quiet prayer to the universe I restarted everything. Success! The USB-2 drive came back to life and, once mounted over the network, I could re-add it to the iTunes library and happily copy, copy, copy, to my shiny iPod. <blockquote>Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Joy!</blockquote> Sure it's much slower transferring to the pod now that the files have to come over the network and it's not convenient to have the USB-2 drive plugged in to my laptop but I can't risk fucking up that drive so that's how it'll have to be for now. Deep breath in, deep breath out Now I have a slightly more than half filled iPod containing tons of music, comedy, drama, documentaries (including a bunch of BBC radio broadcasts on the chemistry of the brain), and podcasts. I listened to the Bruce Shneier IT conversation in bed and, <a href="http://www.terryfrazier.com/weblog/index/2005/04/30#item1674">as Terry said</a>, the man makes a lot of sense. Music and radio are important things in my life and this makes me very happy. Some lingering questions though:<ol> <li>How do I rename my iPod back to CuriousPod?</li> <li>In iTunes how do you get it to recognize that files have been added to folders you've already added to your music library?</li> <li>Is there a known problem with iPod's and other USB-2 devices in Windows?</li> <li>Is it possible to design a surface more guaranteed to get scratched than the back of an iPod?</li> </ol> Update#1: <a href="http://www.bethlet.net/">Beth</a> gave me the answer to Q1. You select the iPod in iTunes and, with it selected, click on the name which then becomes editable. My iPod is now called CuriousPod again! Thanks Beth! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002534.html Initial iPod reflections Wed, 04 May 2005 08:36:55 +0100 So far, so good. Sound quality is excellent. My MP3 CD player never reached a volume that allowed comfortable listening on a busy road. Spoken word stuff was hard to listen to on the tube. My perception is that the iPod is considerably louder and I haven't even tried the volume boost from <a href="http://www.eupod.com/">euPod</a> yet. Any recommendations on noise-cancelling headphones? Battery life is likely to be as mediocre as I was led to expect from the Amazon reviews. In practice I don't think this will be an issue for me and, if it is, the solution is probably an external 'AA' battery pack (I already have rechargable AA's). A car charger is also an option. The iPod won't play Layer-2 MP'3, only Layer-3. I found this out after I dragged a bunch of stuff over and, later, found gaps in the playlists on CuriousPod itself. Fearing more problems I gingerly tried dragging files one at a time and discovered some of them came up with the Stop icon. The common factor was layer-2 and easily solved by converting them within iTunes. So far I'm sticking to MP3 rather than AAC. I have 9Gb free on the pod, I don't think space is going to be the major issue. Having a good case is a must. This thing feels solid but that just means it will make an even louder crash if you drop it. I bought a leather <a href="http://www.exspect.co.uk/">exspect for 4G</a> which has a removable front flap for complete protection. The only problem with it is that you have to remove it from the case to sync or charge. As an aside exspect have the worst website i've come across in some time. It's a flash site which, after several minutes still hasn't loaded, and has no alternative site. Checking the source to the page I found that if you don't have flash it directs you to a page saying <blockquote>"Go Download Flash"</blockquote>Very lame. Nice case though. I'm still assailed by the Joy of having so much stuff to listen to wherever I am. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002537.html Tube test Thu, 05 May 2005 20:30:32 +0100 CuriousPod passed the tube test today requiring only 75%-80% in the noisest stretches to give me a good quality sound. I'm dubious whether audio books would come though quite as well, that's the next test. Overall i'm very pleased though. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002547.html Play nicely now Tue, 17 May 2005 21:30:46 +0100 I'm having trouble figuring out how to make best use of iPod playlists (especially with respect to getting random playback and not including audio books, comedy, documentaries and so forth). I've done some searches and not come up with anything truly useful. Can anyone point me at the definitive guide to playlists on the iPod? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002618.html Getting things to play nice Thu, 19 May 2005 12:10:55 +0100 I seem to have solved the problems with having my 120GB Western Digital USB2 disk and the iPod on the same computer. Previously both were connected directly to the computer one via front USB ports and the other at the rear. I bought a Belkin USB-2 tetrahub and connected both devices to that. I emptied and refilled the iPod without any of the problems I had last time and it's lovely and fast. Fingers crossed that has it cracked. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002624.html Another life used up Fri, 20 May 2005 12:32:38 +0100 I don't know who the miscreant was but during the night my iPod headphones lost a cover and acquired a large claw print in the right ear piece. Fortunately for the furry individual concerned the damage appears to be entirely cosmetic! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002634.html