I wasn’t going to buy a portable music player, because my phone did the job,
but its proprietary connector socket broke so I splashed out on an
iPod Nano.
The bad news
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It doesn’t have an SD card slot.
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It doesn’t take AA (or AAA) batteries.
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It doesn’t play Ogg Vorbis.
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It requires you use an app to stick your music on it (a simple copy doesn’t
work).
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It has some weird tag issues (that’s probably iTunes’s fault).
iTunes
iTunes 7 is the most pathetic piece of software I’ve seen in a
long time. It has a tragic user interface which should be torn up
and redesigned from scratch by someone with a clue. It has a huge
number of ‘technical issues’ too, of course. My favourite (or rather
least favourite) are:
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You’re not allowed to have it running twice on the same computer.
What if my girlfriend has it open because she was playing
music, and now I’m logged in and I’d like to play music or sync
with my iPod? This only happens, ooh, every bloody day.
-
Scrolling the list of tracks is very, very sluggish. As this is
something I do all the time when browsing my music collection,
this is a very annoying problem.
One day I’ll make a page pointing out all the problems with iTunes. For
now, I’ll take a deep breath and simply say that after seeing iTunes on the
PC, I’m a lot less tempted to buy a Mac.
The good news
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It has 4GB storage, which turns out to be more than plenty considering how
easy it is to swap stuff around.
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Its battery lasts a phenomenal amount of time. I’ve taken it to the gym
every day for weeks without putting it on its charger and it wasn’t even
close to empty. It charges while you’re syncing it, so if you do this with
any regularity it’ll always be charged up.
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The display’s great, it does gapless playback and plays AAC and MP3. I had
to ‘transcode’ my Vorbis files, which was not good. Now I have 20GB of
‘original’ files which I don’t want to delete. My method for making AAC
(M4A) files which would work on the iPod with the least hassle, tags
intact, etc. was to search in Windows Explorer for all files in my audio
directory, select them all, right-click and ask
DBpoweramp to convert them ‘in place’. I then
copied the entire audio directory and did a search in the copy for
all files, selected those that weren’t .m4a and deleted them - something
similar for the original directory.
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It has a sliding lock, it transfers files fast (USB 2.0 ‘Hi speed’),
tag support is reasonable, the headphones it comes with are excellent
and it plays loud enough (though only just).
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There are alternative programs to iTunes. Sometime soon I’m going
to try them out because iTunes is causing me pain.