25 Vendémiaire CCXII (October 16, 2003)
Every Dragging Handclap Over Every Dragging Beat
If you talked to me about an hour ago I would have been giddy and estatic. Right now, I'm not, and it's all for the same reason.
But what could have such an effect on me? Simple: iTunes for Windows.
I downloaded it, I uninstalled XPlay and installed iTunes. iTunes informed me that I should reboot but, being the impatient bastard that I am, I just started it up anyways.
Up comes the window, slowly mind you, but it's there and in the menu is an item labelled 'g026r's iPod' complete with all the songs on it.
Score!
So I play with a bit, then I restart my machine because I figure I should. Windows loads up and I get a message about an iPod being installed but no software available. Ok, to be expected. I forgot to install a program to read HFS filesystems and before it was just running off of the bits of XPlay that hadn't been removed.
So I grab a program, install it, and try again. Hmmm… This time it's telling me that iTunes needs to be reinstalled to load the iPod drivers. Ok then, reinstall iTunes, reboot, same message. Hrmm. Now I should be using the FAT32 iPod anyways since I'm in Windows, but there's conflicting reports over whether or not AAC files work in it. I guess there's only one way to find out.
Fast forward to the present and I now have a 'WinniePod' and I'm reripping CDs into AAC format to find out if they'll work. Wish me luck.
Yay! Andrew is a happy boy right now as it seems that AAC files do work in the Windows iPods.
Of course, these are self-ripped AAC files, and not the DRM files from the iTunes store. But due to various issues (*cough*the labels*cough*) the store isn't available in Canada anyways.
Mmmmm... Happy Andrew. : )
Posted by g026r at 25 Vendémiaire CCXII 22:21 (2003/10/16)
Funny that... This Andrew has an iPod too... :) I was fortunate enough to get a 3Gen iPod, so all the cool updates from yesterday I got to take part in.
I would be interested, however, to hear how people's experiences with WiTunes...
Summary of my experience? Well, here goes:
First off, it's slow to load. Very slow to load. Granted I only turn off my computer when I have to and I generally leave my media player running the entire time, but it's still slow to load.
Part of this may be due to the fact that I'm at the minimum recommended RAM requirements (256MB) on Windows XP (which already sucks up an ungodly amount of RAM without anything else running.)
I've also noticed that it tends to freeze slightly when accessing CDs for the first time or when ripping a new track. As far as I can tell this is more of a problem with IDE and Windows than something that iTunes is doing. Irritating but understandable (and, since I'm not planning on doing a lot of ripping once I get everything back on my iPod, it's not something that really bothers me.)
Now, moving on to using the thing: I've seen plenty of complaints over in the iPod Lounge from people who claim that it's messed up their music collection, as far as I can tell that's from people who clicked 'Ok' when it asked them if they wanted to let iTunes reorganise their files or used 'import' rather than 'add'. (Ok, I'll admit that last one is just a little confusing.)
After that the most mentioned issue is problems with playback; apparently some users are having garbled or echoy playback in iTunes. Haven't experienced it, so I can't say for sure.
There's also apparently issues with having a music library bigger than your iPod if you let it autosync. I'm anal about these things and do all my syncing manually, so that doesn't really bother me.
Finally, my major issue is the inability to choose just what files iTunes associates itself with. I installed it then browsed over to My Documents where I noticed that all my Photoshop image files had changed their icons into the iTunes one. No clue as to what would have happened had I clicked on them, but annoying enough for me to leave that turned off.
I haven't used it much beyond that; I listened to some of the streams and I have to say I'm greatly enjoying that, but I haven't used it enough to see whether or not the issues that some people are reporting do affect me as well.
Posted by g026r at 26 Vendémiaire CCXII 13:47 (2003/10/17)
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