I have been assimilated
So, despite brave statements to the contrary, I’ve been forced to abandon my Creative Zen MP3 player and switch to an iPod. In my defence, I didn’t switch out of frustration with my Zen – I was forced to when it stopped working. A trip to the service center proved fruitless – the only suggestion I got was to maybe trade it in for another player.
Back in the market for a new MP3 Player, I drew up a simple list of requirements:
1. Seamless integration between player and software
2. Good podcast support; and
3. Flash based.
That pretty much meant only one player – the iPod Nano. And so it is that I now have a silver 4GB iPod Nano to keep me occupied on the train ride to and from work. It’s actually been a few months since I bought it, so I thought it appropriate to blog about what I love (and loathe) about it:
What I Love:
1. The integration between iTunes and the player is just fantastic – play counts automatically synchronize; iTunes knows which podcasts you have listened to and in case of partially listened-to podcasts, it even knows how far along you are.
2. Podcast support overall is great – the Podcast directory in the iTunes store; downloading and synchronizing podcasts is built right into iTunes; and the player keeps track of where you left off ((though this is quite unstable, more in my loathing section))
3. Design – the player is just gorgeous. Incredibly slim and the flash-based approach means that the battery life is just fantastic.
And… that’s it. That’s all I love about my new iPod. What I loathe on the other hand is quite a bit longer :
What I Loathe:
1. As a music collection management software, the stock iTunes install is incredibly limited. Metadata lookup is simply not accessible if you don’t have an iTunes store account and even then is only accessible if you are going song by song. Media Monkey is leagues ahead of iTunes in this regard.
2. The architecture of iTunes for Windows is terrible – while plugins are supported; the underlying technology is COM, which is ridiculously outdated. The most visible and annoying effects of this decision are
a) each plugin is a separate application and does not integrate into iTunes;
b) iTunes must be running for any plugin to work – even a plugin that aims to clean up the iTunes library!
3. Poor error handling – A lot of my music collection was assembled from old CDs or even floppies (!!) and thus probably have quite a few errors in them. The Creative player handled all these tracks without problems, but the Nano simply choked. In the end I was forced to export my entire collection using Media Monkey ((another win for MM)) ((surprisingly enough, I was able to complete this process for about a 1000 songs during the course of a single working day. Not only that, my laptop remained usable, though slow throughout this process, despite the fact that my CPU was pegged at 100% all the way through – What made the difference was that I had a gig of RAM on the laptop.
)) as 160 kbps CBR MP3s and then reimport the whole lot into iTunes.
4. Random play within playlists isn’t supported – activating Shuffle means every track on the Nano (including podcasts) is fair game. I really miss this feature from the Creative player, as it allowed me to listen to different artists within a “themed” playlist.
5. Remembering playback positions is highly vulnerable during a sync – Like I said earlier I really love the fact that I can select a podcast and pick up right where I left off. However, if while midway through a podcast, I dock the Nano and the sync happens to involve deleting and adding tracks to the Nano – disaster! Selecting the same podcast after sync will result in the player hanging midway between the track list and the podcast itself. And it will stay that way till the battery drains.
As far as I can tell, this happens because the player is keeping track of the specific position in its memory where the playlist playback stopped and when tracks are added and removed, that position info is basically shot. Understandable, but still annoying.
Overall, I think the lack of functionality in the stock iTunes install (especially for managing music) is what really bugs the most. Not to mention having to run 3 extra applications for each plugin I install to fix some of those deficiencies. Had I not been fortunate enough to already have a clean, properly tagged collection of music, I would have been extremely frustrated by the fact that the much-ballyhooed iTunes offered nothing by way of helping me get my music collection under control.
Since my biggest requirement is for hands-off management of Podcasts, I’m sticking with iTunes for now. But I can’t wait to see the new podcast support in Media Monkey.