Friday, January 21, 2005

Technology blues revisited

The iPod is working fine. The iPod is *great*. Apart from the things which are deliberately a bit awkward so that you buy accessories to make them easier. That's evil, but to be expected. But it does what it should and it does it very well.

No, it's fucking iTunes that's the problem.

Until I got an iPod, I used Windows Media Player, with very few problems. But Windows Media Player won't synchronise with iPods, because they are made by Apple and Microsoft hate them.

So I invested hours and hours of valuable sobriety in getting everything into the iTunes library in the right format (it won't take wma files because they are made by Microsoft and Apple hate them) and setting up preferences etc.

Plugged in my iPod and yes, glory be, it synchronised like a dream. Great, I thought, let's get some more music on there.

Ah. iTunes won't rip CDs on our PC. It should, but it doesn't. Occasionally it pretends to, but all you actually get if you play the track is a sad beep beep sound. So I have to rip CDs using Windows Media Player. And then go back to iTunes and add the new folder to the iTunes library as it doesn't automatically pick it up because it's made by Apple etc.

I've set up some great iPod playlists, and I thought I would burn a CD for someone as a birthday present. I spent ages playing with the order of the tracks, getting the exact right length for a CD, setting iTunes to burn them all at the same volume.

But it wouldn't burn via iTunes (should have guessed really). And I can't import the playlist into Windows Media Player as... etc. And now in the Windows Media Player library I have two versions of most tracks as there's the wma version and the mp3 version and I couldn't find a way of seeing all the information I needed by tiling windows so I was reduced to PRINTING THE PLAYLIST OFF so I could reassemble it. Except I didn't reassemble it. It was one kick in the head too far. Bastards.

This would never happen in the Culture.

joella

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