iPod report

[ellarien]

Nice physical design, neat hardware.

Bizarrely annoying software.

Okay, it's an Apple product. What else did I expect?

Sorry, Apple fans. My mind just doesn't work that way; I have a perverse old-fashioned preference for the command line and for knowing my files by name.

Really, who thought it was a good idea that not only 'songs' but my own photos have to exist in a particular directory on a particular computer, and continue to exist there, in order for a scaled-down version to be kept available on the iPod? (The scare quotes around 'songs' are because most of my audio is not the sort that usefully subdivides that way; I have the main menu set to display 'Albums', and that fills my needs nicely.)

Edit: Even more bizarrely, the functionality for manually controlling songs and adding them from more than one computer is there, according to the documentation -- but the same functionality appears not to exist for photos.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

My otherwise peculiar and erratic RCA mp3 player had the nice feature that I could bypass all the "playlist" brouhaha and just use file folders and filenames I provided. Apple's software, which I'm more or less used to, but which still bugs me when I think about it, gets between me and the way I want to use my music. And it renames and hides all my photos, just to prevent against the possibility that I'll want to use one of them in some way. I'm pretty sure it doesn't reduce them, though. The files seem just as big for those little photos on the screen as for the full-sized ones on my hard drive (if not bigger). I'll give it a pass on movies, as I didn't have any previous experience on carrying those around.

And I'd still welcome any kludge or workaround that would let me use my MIDI files on the pod. Dangit, why is it so limited? (Oddly, iTunes will let me play MIDI, but I can't transfer that simple function over.)

I still think my old analogy of the Mac as a demented old family servant who is determined to do things for you that you never asked is quite valid. "Don't worry yourself, I'll see to deleting the hard drive while you sit there in stunned comfort..."

[ellarien]

My photo files run around 1.7Mb, and the iPodized ones are 850K -- maybe yours are smaller to start with?

It is possible to set the iPod to copy over full-resolution files as well, which take their own names with them but can't be directly viewed; I presume also that if you upload files directly from your camera you get the whole thing in a retrievable format. I don't know (and ImageMagick can't tell me) what format the iThmb files are using.