It has been one of those days of incessant technological frustration. The iPod is only part of the problem, but one compounded by a hovering mother-in-law who watches me seeth in frustration at various systems not working, and she gets anxious. Whether her worry is more about the health of her iPod or the mental health of her son-in-law is an open question. Both are in jeopardy.
What I’m trying to do is transfer her music library from my laptop to her desktop. I’m going to need the room next week. The empty iTunes library on her computer decided that since it was vacant, her iPod should be too, and promptly deleted what took me four days to load.
I restored the iPod from my computer, and turned off all the auto-load features I could find in iTunes so that this wouldn’t happen again.. I found a shareware program (iPod2PC) that seemed to work to transfer the iPod contents to the desktop. Then I discovered that, until you paid for the program, it maxed out at 60 songs. I found another program, but it choked on the Apple Loessless format I used to record the collection The problem is still a problem. Anyone have an idea?
Why can’t an iPod just act as though it were a USB hard-drive, which is all it is really. Why can’t Apple play nice with others? My determinedly Apple-free-zone computer has been having its own hissy fits however. USB devices are inexplicibly "Unknown Devices" and don’t work. My Epson printer gets confused and stops printing two-thirds of the way through a print. I took it in to get looked at, but of course everything worked fine at the doctor’s office. Back home it’s a fussy computer again. I bet I know what’s wrong. It’s my aura. It’s messing up any electronic device I come near. Either that or Mercury is in retrograde again.
i am just going through your old blog entries (great reading), and noticed this one. hopefully moving type or whatever you are using alerts you to the presence of a new comments...
i would not use apple lossless. AAC on a high-quality setting with a 5G ipod should work fine, even for classical. i use variable bitrate 192 kbps AAC for mine. you may want to run an experiment on your mother-in-law to see if she can tell the difference, but i doubt it. the switch to AAC should reduce both space and copying time dramatically.
about the one-ipod-one-computer setup that the ipod is limited to, i suspect that this is yet another of these small concessions which apple makes to the music industry in order to keep the itms running and fed. apple themselves don't normally place such arbitrary restrictions on things, in my experience...
i switched to a mac last year, and my thoughts on this are that we are probably too used to our own ad-hoc ways of doing things, forced upon us by generations of windows which did nothing well, but always exposed enough of the guts to allow us to hack our own way through the data-underbrush.
apple's philosophy is to hire the best in the industry, figure out a way to smooth out the workflow, and then force you to work that way. fighting against it can make one as frustrated as trying to make windows behave, but if you give in and learn their way, everything typically suddenly becomes easy and logical (mostly). i think you are not yet at this point with apple/macs, judging from some of your rants :)
btw, congratulations on the purchase of the 5D. i also own this camera, and love it to death. there is only one camera in the world which i might consider getting, and that is the much too expensive Leica R9/DMR. perhaps in another lifetime. as a non-pro photographer, i really cannot justify that kind of outlay.
a tip which you may not like: once Aperture 1.1 is released, you may want to drop by an apple store and have someone demo it for you. this application has so much potential in so many ways. worth watching, even for a PC-using photographer.
Posted by: carsten | April 09, 2006 at 04:49 AM