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February 13, 2006

Dear Apple: WTF? (, )

by fluffy at 11:15 PM
  • iPhoto sucks at managing photos which I scanned in from negatives (it can't decide whether to display them inverted or not, and won't let me specify which way to display them)
  • Aperture is goddamn SLOW and is actually worse than iPhoto for my particular image management needs (oh and thanks for providing a demo version so I wouldn't have to warez it to try it out OH WAIT YOU DIDN'T but don't worry I'm deleting it because no it doesn't actually work for my needs)
  • My new 30GB iPod 5G fucking sucks (hey thanks for gracefully handling errors and maybe putting an explanatory message up on the screen OH HEY WAIT YOU DIDN'T) (2/18 01:00 If you want to solve this problem without writing an application, check out this handy guide)

  • Didn't Image Capture use to allow the usage of the TWAIN driver's own user interface? because my scanner's TWAIN interface provides some pretty nifty bulk-scanning stuff which Image Capture doesn't, not to mention Image Capture doesn't understand 16bpc/HDR mode making it utterly useless for scanning film (and of course Aperture's idea of an "import" is "pulling stuff off a memory card" and choking when it tries to display the stuff "on" my scanner because it doesn't have a memory card OMGWTF, which was the whole reason I was even trying it out to begin with)
Seriously, you guys are slipping. The sad thing is that Apple stuff is STILL the best stuff on the market, if only because everything else is WAY THE HELL WORSE.

Jesus crap. I thought hobbies were supposed to be FUN.

2005/02/15 I've sent the iPod back to Amazon, with a replacement en route. Hopefully it'll turn out that it was just a bad drive. If this one still crashes I'll try downgrading it to the v1.0 firmware. If that doesn't help I'll just get a refund and a Nano (which runs the classic iPod OS, not the video-enabled one). Meh.

2005/02/17 It didn't.

Comments

#7031 02/14/2006 11:46 am Honestly...
The iPod is not the best on the market. Never has been.

The only feature that my iRiver lacks that the iPod has is DRMed AAC playback. On the other hand, they do OGG, FLAC, WMA, have an FM tuner, a mike and better battery life. (Not to mention that firmware is availble to make it work like a normal USB drive (if you're willing to give up DRMed WMA) which means that I can load the thing from any machine without special software, including my linux box.

At best, iPods are superior in that subjective category "design".
#7032 02/14/2006 02:06 pm
Feature-wise iPod is not the best. Interface-wise and lack-of-needing-to-fuck-with-things-to-get-music-loaded-on-it-wise, the iPod is WAY the hell better than anything else I've used.
#7033 02/14/2006 06:01 pm Re: Honestly...
"ucblockhead"
The iPod is not the best on the market. Never has been.

The only feature that my iRiver lacks that the iPod has is DRMed AAC playback. On the other hand, they do OGG, FLAC, WMA, have an FM tuner, a mike and better battery life. (Not to mention that firmware is availble to make it work like a normal USB drive (if you're willing to give up DRMed WMA) which means that I can load the thing from any machine without special software, including my linux box.

At best, iPods are superior in that subjective category "design".


Which model is it that does Flac?
#7035 02/14/2006 06:56 pm
...lack-of-needing-to-fuck-with-things-to-get-music-loaded-on-it-wise...

With my iRiver, I use the highly complex cp command to copy music to it. With Windows, I use the confusing "drag from folder on file system to file system on device" method.

I may have mispoken about flac. I'm too lazy to check.

I personally don't find iPods themselves any easier to use. (Well, they're easier then Sony crap, but who buys Sony?)
#7036 02/14/2006 07:02 pm
Copying files to a device is only easy if you have less stuff to put onto the device than the size of the device. Even the largest iPod doesn't hold my entire library. iTunes' smart playlist management makes it easy.

I mean, sure, most mp3 players these days let you just copy the files to the device (and even the iPod does, though the directory it gets copied to is hidden). That doesn't matter. Having to decide WHICH files to copy is fucking-with-things-to-get-music-loaded-on-it.

Not to mention the issue of incremental sync. (Yes yes I know you can use rsync for that but that still doesn't address the first problem.) Also with iTunes you just plug it in, it poots the selection of files onto the device, and then unmounts it. All automatically. No need to write shell scripts or do lots of actions or whatever.

I mean, I'm sorry if I just want to PLUG IT IN AND HAVE IT WORK. Sorry for not being enough of a geek to want to micromanage every aspect of my listening experience.
#7037 02/15/2006 12:47 am Er
iTunes isn't the only software that does that. What other devices have you tried?
#7038 02/15/2006 08:46 am
The other thing is that I can't try the other devices' syncing software because they don't work with a Mac. But also I know how to deal with iTunes now and I really don't want to have to manage yet ANOTHER library management tool.
#7039 02/15/2006 12:44 pm
Niggle: If you just stick a file into the iPod_Control/Music directory, the iPod still won't recognize it. There's another database file which iTunes updates when it sticks files on the iPod - and that's why you're able to do useful things like browse by album on the iPod.

THIS, incidentally, is why any player that allows the user to copy over music from the shell is going to have usability issues - either the player will have to interpret ID3 tags, which is prone to failure (ID3 is notoriously difficult to parse correctly in all situations), or indices on album/artist/genre simply won't be available.
#7040 02/15/2006 02:15 pm
Hm, but iTunes just uses id3 tags to populate that database to begin with.
#7041 02/15/2006 05:26 pm
That's the idea. iTunes is reading the tags ahead of time so the iPod doesn't have to.
#7042 02/15/2006 10:11 pm RE: copying music
The ipod doesn't completely fulfill my requirements for music, and I'm fine with that. Here's what I don't like: why do I need apple-related software to copy music from my folder to the ipod?

I don't know if this has been done, but could they could come out and say: "here's how we store our data and here's what we do to access it"? I know: various open-source solutions have come out to do this and more with linux, but this is tiresome and inefficient.

The sad thing is that at this point, the ipod has become a social music tool. Chances are that if you have one and someone else has a pc/mac running popular OSes, you can use it. There's a whole ipod-oly-accesories market that's booming right now. So, why should you buy anything else?
#7044 02/15/2006 11:44 pm
Well, the format is pretty well figured out by now. Regardless, that's a good question.
#7051 02/16/2006 10:07 am Three words
"Digital Rights Management"

It's almost certain due to fairplay. I know that with the iRiver, you have a choice either of not having to use their software, or having DRM.

One the other hand, the KDE program Amarok claims to work with iPods as does the "JRiver Media Center" (I have not tried this with either.) I don't know if they made some sort of deal with Apple or what.
#7052 02/16/2006 11:32 am Re: Three words
ucblockhead
"Digital Rights Management"

One the other hand, the KDE program Amarok claims to work with iPods

Kinda-sorta. The cryptic
cp
command crashes the latest Amarok (1.3 I think?). But reading is fine.
#7054 02/16/2006 07:31 pm
I doubt FairPlay has anything to do with it. m4p files are protected whether or not they're inside an iTunes library, and when they're not in an iTunes library other things can read their id3-equivalent just fine as it's only the audio stream chunk which is encrypted. The only real issue is of getting the key onto the device, and once iTunes syncs with an iPod once it puts its FairPlay key(s) on it (which is also how JHymn most easily gets the key for decryption).
#7056 02/16/2006 10:47 pm
Fairplay includes things like copy counts, so there's restrictions on copying it elsewhere. The filesystem doesn't know anything about the DRM and hence cannot enforce it. (It doesn't know to decrement copy counts and such.) This means that Fairplay requires software over and above the filesystem to work.
#7057 02/16/2006 10:52 pm
Are you sure about that? I thought that Fairplay's copy counts were enforced based on how keys were granted, when you authorize your iTunes against Apple's server. like, I thought that FairPlay grants unlimited copies to portable devices, and only restricts you on burn count and authorized computers (and there's ways of faking it out by e.g. backing up the iTunes key, deauthorizing your computer, and then putting the key back).
#7058 02/17/2006 02:57 am Re: Three words
ucblockhead
It's almost certain due to fairplay. I know that with the iRiver, you have a choice either of not having to use their software, or having DRM.


Well, the iPod was around and using its current library format well before ITMS came out, so that kills that theory, unless you're going to suggest that Apple had their DRM all planned out and ready a year and a half before the store launched. (The iPod came out in late 2001; iTMS opened in early 2003.)