My mother-in-law just got an iPod. It has made her exceedingly happy. Being the IT go-to guy in my family, it has been up to me to configure and upload her classical CD collection, whic h is heavily weighted toward obscure and difficult Bach. It has been an education learning a new technology.
The first barrier is the generational divide about how we experience music. The iPod modality is one of no respect for genre or compilation integrity. We boomers grew up with the notion of an album as a whole statement. The artistic message inherent in a sequence of music that, as an aggregate, completes an experience, is something that the technology does not easily support. I copied Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, which spans multiple disks, into iTunes, along with several other recordings (Glenn Gould, Pablo Casal’s Cello Suites, the Mass in B Minor). Itunes broke up all of these recordings, jumbled the tracks, and reconfigured them in some unusual, incoherent sequence of its own inimitable logic.
I Googled the problem and figured out a workaround. I recopied everything, making each disk a single track. Messing around the iPod itself, I realized that it would take some time to learn the particular logic of the structure of this device. It’s hard to understand just how to start and stop the thing, much less navigate the various nested menus to find what you’re looking for and figure out how to select it. The little wheel is an exceedingly simple interface, but it is never clear what function mode your in. For example, I can't figure out how to back out of a song and get into the list again. The volume just changes, or there's a long pause before anything happens. Elly and I are both struggling. Much as Apple wants us to believe that the logic of its machinery is transparent, the iPod has one of the more obtuse interfaces I have ever encountered. Speaking of difficult, don’t get me started on those damn earpod things.
That said, I’m wondering if I want an iPod in my life. It is not my habit to anesthesize myself with music in my daily routine, though it might be said that I use NPR for that, as when I’m working at home my radio is usually on and tuned to KUOW. The one arena in which music, as a dissociative mechanism, might be useful is with my flying anxiety. I plugged in the plane's earphones on my last flight during a slightly rough descent, and I didn’t go through my usual terror and panic response as the plane bounced around. I’m going to be in the air a lot in the next couple of months. If I can remove myself from the present reality when the present reality is one I don’t want to be in (like bouncing around the atmosphere in a cylindrical tube completely out of my control), an iPod might be something I want. And it has fewer side effects than Xanax.
Believe it or not, I, a Mac loyalist, have been vexed by the iTunes universe too.
Naming in iTunes music libraries - apparently "smart" enough to place The Beatles in the B's instead of T's, but dumb enough to put Shawn Colvin in the S's (and everything other act by their first name), only remedy is to tediously retype names starting with last name.
"Fair Play" - Apple's name for their propietary system to limit piracy of music. I am all for protecting copyrights of artists, but they take it a step too far, I think. Every song you buy from their iTunes Store, which is fairly priced and convenient, is encoded so that it can only be played through iTunes on a computer, or their iPods. You can burn it to as many discs as you want, but can't play it on a regular stereo or in the car, unless you hook up your iPod. Either way you are constantly tethered to an Apple device or software, which is their idea of fair play.
Yes, those white Earbuds suck (they scream Hey I've got an Ipod! to everyone), I jettisoned them after a day for an anonymous and better sounding pair in neutral gray.
Posted by: Chris Junker | November 21, 2005 at 07:27 AM
Chris' comment above:
You can burn it to as many discs as you want, but can't play it on a regular stereo or in the car, unless you hook up your iPod.
is inaccurate. I have plenty of music that I'vd gotten from iTunes and have burned to CD and listened to on various CD players. You have to make sure that you're burning an audio CD rather than an MP3 CD - maybe that's the problem?
Doug, I'd be happy to give you an iPod tutorial if you'd like... bring it along on Thursday. I've had one since the first generation and have found it really easy to use. Of course, it could be that it's just a brain wiring thing, how we work with stuff.
Oh, one thing - I tend to like to listen to full albums too, so what I do is create playlists out of each album when I import them. That's done the trick for me.
Posted by: Kristina Spencer | November 21, 2005 at 08:59 AM
Hee hee. I'm sorry you're going through so much pain - but I still think iPods are incredibly simple and self-explanatory. It sounds like your problem is differentiating between pushing buttons on the click wheel and using the wheel itself, for which the old iPods had a better solution (having the buttons separate).
You seem to have figured out the track list problem - but fyi you can select by album on the iPod and listen to one album at a time. Or for something that uses multiple discs you can create a playlist for all of them - which makes it superior to a CD player, where you have to switch from one CD to the next.
It must be a generational thing - more than just experiencing music. I've been seeing iPods around since high school sometime and when I got mine in hand it took me about 30 seconds to figure out which buttons to use when.
Good luck.
Any news on Israel?
Posted by: Felicity | November 22, 2005 at 07:29 PM
Felicity,
We're in this weird iPod vortex here. I think the machines detect the age of the user, and act so as to befuddle us boomers. Elly loves hers, and decided that Robin needed one, and so I'm managing two of them. Yet none of us has any proficiency in the basics of navigating the damn things. And managing iTunes--what a nightmare! It took me a long time to solve a problem Elly has, of the St. Matthew Passion playing out of order (it spans 3 disks). Just figuring out a mode where the program will let you resequence the playlist took a month off my life. Now I'm trying to transfer libraries from one computer to another, which Apple would prefer no one ever figure out how to do.
Doug
Posted by: Doug | November 22, 2005 at 10:09 PM
I've owned a dozen or so mp3 players, some cheap no-names and others not (like the Sansa). Every one of them has been a piece of junk. Every one of them has broken. Every one of them more complicated and less logical than the iPod. I, too, am having a little difficulty figuring out the whole iPod system. Bottom line, though, is I upload music, strap the iPod to my arm, turn it on, select a playlist and head out for a jog -- and the thing plays music while I run. Funny that, with needs as simple as these, so many of the other mp3 players out there are such pieces of crap. The iPod may not be the ultimate, omnipitant player we all wish we had (which does not exist). But at least the thing works. I don't love my iPod, but I do love everything else out there a hell of a lot less. -- Mike
Posted by: Mike Turco | March 23, 2008 at 08:20 PM