Recently I’ve been caring less about everything on my computer being customized and tweaked to my exact needs. I think that attitude was my main problem with all things Apple. Their products generally come out of the box the way they are and stay that way forever. iTunes for example, will always have an interface not native to Windows that just doesn’t quite feel right. It doesn’t help that the program is kind of slow and clunky, but even if it were fast the behaviors are not natural for Windows. Which makes sense considering it’s Apple and it was designed for their own OS in the first place. But it’s the obtuseness of porting all that behavior over to Windows that bothers me. Why not hire some Windows developers to make a program natively for Windows. Or at the very least, open up the iPod so any program can do everything iTunes does without messy reverse-engineering. I get that they want to sell you stuff on the iTunes Store but that doesn’t really make me feel any better about the situation.
I’ve been reexamining the alternatives lately, because I decided to buy one of those new iPod Nanos. I was considering buying a Touch but decided I would rather have something more compact since I’m never ever going to watch videos or play games on an iPod. I was also considering a non-Apple player, but the ubiquity of iPods is appealing and there’s nothing significantly superior out there anyway. I used to still do hate the iPod white plastic bar-of-soap design, but these Nanos are pretty slick. Plus it comes in orange. Orange rules. So yeah, iTunes alternatives. Winamp does more or less everything iTunes does, but somehow they made an even worse media library interface than Apple did so that’s out. My music player of choice (Foobar2000) has an iPod plug-in but it would require some work to get it doing roughly 90% of the stuff iTunes does. And like I said at the start, I just don’t want to spend time messing around with that anymore. Maybe this winter when I’m sitting at home with nothing to do.
But for now, I’ve got iTunes 8 installed and I’ve been using it for about a week. I still wouldn’t say it’s a well designed program but it does some things well and I haven’t been driven away in frustration… so it’s not so bad. I’ve been using the Genius playlist generation feature a lot. It’s a feature that appeals to people who like the experience of listening to the radio (except without commercials). You hear some songs frequently enough that they get stuck in your head, with some less often played songs filling the space between. Coverflow is also kinda neat, assuming you have nice album art for everything. Which reminds me, one time-consuming task was getting all my album art showing up in iTunes. It won’t just look for a .jpg in the album folder, you have to embed it into each MP3’s id3 tag. I first tried a program that automates this task, but it resized all my album art into a low resolution blurry mess before embedding. So I had to hunt down good quality album art for each of my ~300 albums and embed them all within iTunes one album at a time. That fucking sucked. But not totally iTunes’ fault.
As for the iPod Nano, it plays MP3s. That’s all I really need. I’ve always felt the wheel was a little awkward for scrolling through large lists of items, but other than that I have no issues with it. I like that I can generate Genius playlists on the Nano. I like the way it looks. Not sure what else you can say about an iPod anymore. Oh, I had bought a better pair of in-ear canalphones before I got the iPod, knowing the reputation of Apple’s bundled earbuds. And if I’m just sitting at my desk I can definitely tell the difference in quality. But the microphonic effect of the cable brushing against my clothing (caused by having a sealed ear canal) is really distracting. So when I’m moving (i.e. any situation where I would want to use the iPod), the bundled Apple earbuds are less irritating and I can’t really tell the difference in quality anyway. So that was a waste of 80 bucks.
In summary, I’m totally over hating on Apple. Mostly.
