A kind soul gave me a 20gb iPod for Windows today. It comes in a tidy little cube, and when I opened it up, the refinement of the packaging had me drooling in moments. An elegant folding box, revealed all the parts nicely tucked away in static bags that are more fashion statement than necessity. Lift enough flaps and you reveal the iPod itself which was slimmer, smoother, and more sexy than I thought they were.
The Apple packaging and presentation folks' game is tight.
So I figured the same would hold true when I installed the device, which doesn't amount to much more than plugging a dock into a firewire card and launching aan install CD.
Well.... the beauty and elegance seems to have stopped there.
The thing just simply didn't work. The iPod manager couldn't work the device. I could see the iPod was listed as an installed device, but that was it.
After frustrating time spent searching for technical help on the Apple website (truly the windows support site has much better navigation) I figured I had found the problem. It seems that the iPod is extremely finicky about what FireWire card you use. Even if your card works with everything else (as mine does -- a nikon scanner, an epson 2100 printer, sony digital video camera), it doesn't mean your iPod will.
So it seems like my card (Via 1394 OHCI compliant host controller ), which came with my Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra 2 motherboard is not certified as compliant with XP (although it is for Win 2000).
I dug around my boxes of random computer junk and found another firewire card that came w/ my Nikon Coolscan ED 4000 scanner. This one was a Ratoc PSIFW2 firewire card. Installed, it tells XP that it is a "NEC 1394 OHCI compliant host controller," which also is not certified for XP, only Win 2000.
Anyway, I figured it worth a shot and plugged it in too. Well, it worked for some reason. iPod manager could see the device.
So I resumed the installation. Goodness gracious, I felt like I was installing RealAudio player. The CD installed at least three different softwares (the drivers and managers, MusicMatch [with whom I've had a run-in before], and something called Audible.
I think for sure I could have skipped Audible (software for digital books).
MusicMatch is the XP alternative to whatever software Apple uses on their Mac's to manage the playlists on iPods. First things first, I forbade it from associating with any file types whatsoever. It is strictly for managing my playlists. It took a bit of tussling before it would recognize my iPod, but after a turn-on/turn-off it seems to be behaving nicely and regularly.
I'm a bit concerned, though. It seems to be obsessed with metadata tags (titles, artists, genres, and so on).
Well, here's my setup:
I've got 16GB of mp3's in a single directory. I've pulled these things from everywhere from Napster to Gnutella to USENET. Many are rips of BBC Radio One broadcasts. Basically the "metadata" is a total farrago. I sure hope that MusicMatch isn't so fixated on good metadata that it makes using my poorly-notated music (which is 99% of the library) too much a chore.
Does anyone have any advice one what I should do to organize my music? I really have no interest or time to be screwing with it an awful lot.
One other embarassing note... So as I mentioned above, the install didn't go that smoothly. At some point it looked like it was finally working and setting itself up. One of the steps is formatting. I started at the iPod "formatting" for twenty minutes, groaning to myself that something was bad, but trying to be patient. Finally I realized that the blinking "Do not disconnect" is just it saying that it is docked in with the PC and operating normally! So much for a meaningful UI!