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wey-hey I got the new iPod nano but …


Sync in Progress
Originally uploaded by Andrew*

I was quite surprised to find the new iPod nano 3G along with the rename iPod classic was available in Australia 2 days after Steve Jobs announced it (it was Wednesday in San Fran, but Thursday in Oz). I through pure power of will alone resisted the temptation to buy it then and there, my facade broke by Tuesday and like the iPod whore I am I ordered one online and it arrived yesterday, which was Friday.

First off it looks great and I have shown it to a good few cynical engineers that are known of their skepticism for geeky gadgets, but even they were impressed.

However I have already ran into two problems. Firstly after I loaded up my default playlists and then disconnected from the computer the nano would freeze. It appeared to be some thing to do with the new cover flow application trying to arrange the images. After a few resets of the nano it started to play ball. However any time I disconnected from the PC it would start freezing again. Then this morning when I connected to iTunes it informed me that there is a 1.01 firmware upgrade (bare in mind this device was only release 9 days earlier ) after I updated the firmware the problem seems to have gone away. I have done a search on a 1.01 firmware for the apple nano 3G and can’t get any details on what was fixed so I can only assume that the cover flow issue I was seeing.

Problem number 2, I hate iTunes, I’ve run it on I don’t know how many machines and I find it clunky, buggy and I have successfully crashed many times. I especially don’t like the way it doesn’t dynamically track a folder that has been added to a library. It should be removing files that are no longer present and adding new files (which is usually just me moving files around as I catalog them) which it doesn’t. Winamp I find is a lot better for this and I have been using it for my iPod video for a while. However when I plugged in the new nano, winamp recognised the nano alright, and I copied over playlists. However when I ejected the nano and started trying to browse the music, nothing. I found that strange and didn’t think too much about it.

Then I find the internet alive this morning with the linux community finding the same problem, “iPods reengineered to block synching with Linux“, I’m guessing this is the same problem I’m seeing in winamp. This is a surprise. After Steve Jobs writes his magical letter coming out against DRM to find that they are employing DRM tatic to stop 3rd party apps from downloading to new iPods. Hopefully people can find a way to circumvent this. Apparently the DRM tactic uses SHA-1 hashes to maintain it’s database tables, SHA-1 has been proven to be breakable and maybe that can be exploited (though currently to achieve a successful collision is considered within reach of massive distributed Internet search).

With all that said, I can’t wait to see the iPod touch once it comes out at the end of the month.

6 replies on “wey-hey I got the new iPod nano but …”

Sounds cool!
I’m still debating between the ipod nano and the ipod classic. I like having a lot of storage.
And I totally hear you about iTunes! That thing is way too complicated than what it should be!

I love iTunes. I loved it from the moment Mark told me to install it on my PC months before I got my first iPod at all so I’d be used to the thing. I can’t imagine my life without it. It has honestly crached about about 10 times in over 3 years which I find acceptable.

I find it painfully easy to crash things. Computers are still 10 years behind where I’d be using them. Compressing full motion video while watching a tv show and performing some OCR on DVD subtitles – Apparently the video card doesn’t like that. Don’t even get me started on crashing my N95.

iTunes is dull, I have many machines I interact with and my music collection, there should be more dynamic support for music. Winamp has some of it and it coming along. itunes is to internet explorer as winamp is to firefox!

Winamp? That’s just a player I thought. I use it for playing something I grab off the net to see if it’s worthy of importing to iTunes and generating cover artwork. Does Winamp import all your album cover and let you browse by the artwork and have an online store now? Hell, I must be using an old version, mine just looks like this. As you know Artwork is a big thing for me, I need to be able to “see” what I’m listening to. If Winamp can do EVERYTHING iTunes can do and more and do it better, then I may “inspect” it…

Whoa, don’t get me wrong winamp isn’t a fully featured solution, but neither is iTunes, both need a fair bit of work in my opinion. I personally can live without album art. It is the dynamic library support and search in media library that I feel is better than iTunes. Also winamp has global hot key support which allows for control of winamp even when it isn’t the active window. But alas at the moment the new iPods are not supported properly in winamp so I have been forced back to iTunes (yes grudgingly).

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