apple is at it again
many news sites are reporting today on apple's update to the ipod. being an industrial design nut, i've wanted to buy one for quite a while. however, there are two things holding me back:
speaking of the shuffle, when i met scoble a few weeks back, he had one. he'd had it for over a week and hadn't loaded any music on it nor had he even plugged it into his computer. the problem was the fact that you have to load software from a CD. his argument was: if the shuffle is a storage device, why doesn't the device contain the software and bootstrap itself when plugged into the usb port?
oh, and he was clearly content using the shuffle for its secondary purpose: a fashion accessory.
update: a company called jens of sweden has a new player called the mp-120. i want one really bad, but they aren't sold in the us yet. argh!
- there's no way they are going to get me to use itunes
- it only plays mp3s (believe it or not, i have quite a bit of music in wma format)
speaking of the shuffle, when i met scoble a few weeks back, he had one. he'd had it for over a week and hadn't loaded any music on it nor had he even plugged it into his computer. the problem was the fact that you have to load software from a CD. his argument was: if the shuffle is a storage device, why doesn't the device contain the software and bootstrap itself when plugged into the usb port?
oh, and he was clearly content using the shuffle for its secondary purpose: a fashion accessory.
update: a company called jens of sweden has a new player called the mp-120. i want one really bad, but they aren't sold in the us yet. argh!
posted by markjen at 2/23/2005 08:53:00 AM
11 Comments:
I am confused now, music makes me a lot less productive. A Walkman is a silly tool you don't want to carry around. A walkman is A social. How can M$ allow working with headphones? If you forget about the mental disability's, the being unavailable for communication, people having to repeat things they really did say and really didn't get listend to... If we would skip all that, it's still not safe at all.
It's a big hazard. Deaf people don't respond to explosions screaming cars or fire. Your team member could choke to death just outside sight.
Yes he died, but I didn't ignore him I was listening to music. LOL
I have to mention this, I got my wife the iPod shuffle for her birthday and I took it out of the box and plugged it into my computer and it setup, no CD needed. Now, I di have the latest iTunes ver loaded, but I thought it was the easiest process.
deconstructing - you are right, itunes does support more formats. thanks for giving me the heads up :)
haberstroh - i use windows media player and i am against itunes becuase it only plugs into apple's music store. which would be fine, except i'm sort of an audiophile and i want my music to be at a higher bitrate than 128kbps.
while conversion is an option, sound quality is affected in a dramatic way when you switch between formats.
scotfl - apple could have created a bootstrap on the shuffle which would be a very small installer that kicks off a download of the full blown product from the internet. they could make this bootstrap read-only. clearly this requires an internet connection, but it is slightly better than having to find a CD.
additionally, i think i should be able to load songs onto a shuffle just by copying files to the device. this would prevent the need for any sort of software (USB mass storage devices are supported by OSes without additional drivers).
however, they clearly want to lock you into an apple-only environment (which is completely understandable from a business perspective). it's just annoying to me from a user experience perspective.
Now that is funny! Maybe I should mail an ipod on Bill Gates Birthday...does anyone know when that is?
Hola,
Entiendo que el tema de hoy es hablar de los sistemas portátiles de audio pero aún me queda la duda si realmente fuiste parte de un truco publicitario de Google o realmente un trabajador de esa compañía.
Alguien me dijo que era parte de una campaña publicitaria agresiva de Google (el construirte conjunto con el Blog).
¿Quieren contactarme? Me encuentran en mi blog.
Saludos a todos, considero que el iPod es muy bueno por cierto
Forget iPOD, and treat yourself with iRiver H320. I bought this after a lot of research, and beats iPOD hands down anyday. It plays MP3, WMA & OGG Formats, has built in FM Player, recorder and connects to PC as an external drive. It has Windows-like tree file structure. Comes with color screen and has JPEG Photo broswer (like iPOD Photo), and costs same as 20GB iPOD. Isn't that a great deal?
I have an MD player from Sony. They are tiny little things popular in Japan and Europe. It plays music off of MiniDiscs that look like a tiny floppy disc, but each disc holds at least 3 hours of music. That's on the cheaper versions(like mine). The more expensive kind can hold lots more music per disc. It's base program is Sonic Stage. You should consider those as an option, if you haven't already.
Best Wishes.
I don't have an iPod, but I have iTunes, and I use Airport Express to send music from my laptop to my stereo.
I think iTunes is one of the most well designed Windows application in existance. Windows Media Player can't hold a candle to it.
Great software is after all the reason Apple still exists, in thr face of competition from Windows and Linux.
I was supposed to get an iPod late last year, I have to admit I was affected by the battery controversy. From where I am, there aren't any aftermarket batteries, and getting Apple to replace it can be expensive.
This was also the reason why I eschewed the Tungsten T3 for an iPAQ 4150, the built in batteries. I know tech things inevitably get obsolete but knowing beforehand that a gizmo only has a lifespan of sorts up to when the battery wears out didn't really sit well with me. Got an iRiver iFP-790T flash memory based player. Uses an AA battery, lasts for 40 hours. No fuss. Oh yes, its 1 gig memory pales before the monster capacities of hard disk based players, but in a year or two, in all likelihood, it will still be working. An iPOD? Maybe not.
honestly, people complain about using itunes software, but it is a godsend.
1) letting itunes auto-manage your 6,000 + songs and auto directorize them into nice organized directories.....time saved: 100 hours
2) letting an itunes "smart" playlist catch all songs you throw at your library and ones that are already there, with live updating....time saved on creating playlists: 1,000,000 hours
3) being able to manually manage your songs when you want to? sure can, just check the "manually manage songs" option in the ipod prefs in itunes.
4) live-searching where you can simply enter a text string and get fast results? - time saved ......10000000 hours..........
Now that I have saved millions of hours off my life, and only have apple to thank........I think I'll still stay and play around on my macintosh cuz it's fun :-) I can always find some fun *nix things to do.
The thing is:
(1)
No music software is as easy or as clean (on EITHER platform) as iTunes. The only reason to use others: (Read this in an Eddie Murphy nerdy whiteboy voice) "so that I can create my own skins"
Get - a - life.
(2) What saddo would want anything BUT an iPod these days? iRiver and Creative's efforts are butt-ugly. (ooh, suits Windozes users then!) The only thing that comes close to being cooler than the iPod is the beautiful Olympus M:Robe players.
oh, and yes, music at work, unless it's instrumental, does feck up your work. But it's fun, so just be sensible.
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