iPod - iTunes
by Merv Burger on Dec.29, 2006, under General
My sister got an iPod today.
Now, this isn’t anything newsworthy, this is a fairly common occurrence.
The difference here is that I’m the one stuck setting the damned thing up.
Did you know, that it’s absolutely possible to somehow screw up the process of using an iPod in iTunes?
I was shocked to find out that it is possible.
I don’t even know what I did, but iTunes wouldn’t recognize it. Apparently this is a frequent enough problem that it’s a top support solution on the iPod support page.
So I get iTunes to recognize it. I might be getting somewhere!
Except I’m not!
Somewhere, somehow, I managed to “corrupt” the iPod and that it needed to be “restored.”
Well, except it didn’t need to because that was just a lie and the restore “process” wasn’t going anywhere.
I disconnected the iPod and plugged it back in, this time with success! Of course, success would come only after logging out every other user on the computer to give the iPod Service it’s necessary 1.3GHz of processing power to use the USB port.
There were finally some songs on the damned thing after about 3 hours of frustrating work.
Then I found out that I really could use Winamp to manage the iPod (like I, and my sister, wanted to,) and that I only needed iTunes to “initialize” the iPod. Thanks for telling me this!
iTunes 7 is absolutely the worst program I have ever had the displeasure of using. I was describing some of the issues I was having to my brother, who has a 4th gen iPod, but uses iTunes 6 (I think,) and his response can be summed up as “What.”
What I was dealing with was just ridiculous CPU and memory usage that cause the program to freeze for long periods of time, not even some of the other myriad of problems that have plagued iTunes since it went to version 7.
And I’ve spoken to Mac users before, and they say it’s only marginally better on the Macintosh platform (
says because they don’t have to port their UI over, which is where I bet a lot of the bloat in Windows comes from.)
I think I’m just gonna stick with my Zen Touch, just purely based upon the fact that when I plug it into my computer, it works.
