under construction, as ever :)

My new ‘aaipod’ :D

September 14th, 2007 Posted in gadgets

Last tuesday I got myself a shiny blue new iPod nano. I’d been considering the ‘old’ nano with 8gb of storage already, since I figured that would be enough for almost all my music and I would be able to run with it (harddisks don’t like the shakes ‘n bounces, and I don’t like the weight of my old ipod-with-disk while being physically active etc). Anyhow, then the new nano came out and it has a really nice high-res screen plus video capablity. Obviously I was sold :)

Although I’m very happy with it and it meets my expectations pretty well, there are a few minor (software) issues that I’d like to voice. Since there’s no obvious ‘GIVE FEEDBACK ON THE NEW NANO HERE’-button on the Apple website I’ll just make a list here and either hope they find it or that I stumble upon a mail address where I can this list in the near future. Either way: it’s convenient to have the list laying around somewhere :)

  • Although I sync my podcasts, the ‘played’ status doesn’t sync back to iTunes. I’ll clarify: if I have watched an episode on my iPod, I want it marked as ‘not new’ everywhere after a sync, because it’s tedious to manually figure out what’s new, plus in a lot of cases I’d like the ‘old’ eps to be auto-deleted.
  • The cover flow functionality doesn’t seem to group by album or composer, but by artist, which gives you rather too much covers in case of compilations or mix albums. I haven’t found a configuration option for this behaviour and even then I’d state here that how it behaves now is not such a good default.
  • Another podcast feature I miss is to reverse the order: when a podcast is finished playing the iPod continues with the next item in the list, which is usually the older episode you’ve just been watching / listening to before the current one. Also reversing the order would make selecting ‘the oldest unheard/unviewed’ much easier: it should be somewhere near the top of your list then.
  • Why is the result of ‘convert for ipod’ on movies up to twice the size of the original, while the video resolution is actually taken down???

PS for the non-dutchies: an ‘aai’ is a petting. The verb ‘aaien’ means petting, or maybe more precisely, stroking. Fluffy yes? :D

Update September 18th:
Mmm, since this post a new nano-softwareupdate has become available (1.0 -> 1.0.1), and I get the impression it has resolved the first issue on my list: the podcast I’ve listened to yesterday is shown as ‘played’ in the iTunes list of podcasts after a sync. Yay :)

I also got a tip to make the multi-artist albums a ‘compilation’ but that doesn’t resolve the cover flow issue unfortunately. You can mimic my nano’s behaviour by sorting your iTunes db on ‘artist’ and then looking at cover flow. Because of all the different artists you get the complilation cover multiple times.
IMO when you want to browse covers you’re looking for albums, rather than artists: there are better ways to browse ‘all by this artist’ anyway. Hence I’ll stick with my previous statement that it’s a poorly chosen default.

  1. 2 Responses to “My new ‘aaipod’ :D”

  2. By Solitas on Sep 14, 2007

    You might be interested in http://ipodminusitunes.blogspot.com/2007/09/apple-cuts-us-off.html - I know you have a Mac available, but it might still be interesting to know that Apple doesn’t want you to have a choice when it comes to using your own hardware… :P

  3. By Liessa on Sep 16, 2007

    Yes I know. I don’t think I would have considered an iPod even if I would be using Windows as my main OS, because the two occasions where I had to use the Windows version of iTunes I was not too enthusiastic about it.
    Anyhow, the everyday practice is that my mac is booted in OS X about 99% of the time (asin always except for when H wants to play GuildWars which is not too often) so for _me_ the apple-dependancy is not really an issue. I used to be pretty anti ‘iApps’, because it was then my (Windows) experience that I’m usually not happy with defaults. That gradually changed however and I now use some of the iApps because they’re just the easiest option that does what I want for my system. In the case of music players I guess I’m just a lazy bastard: giefv drag ‘n drop ;)

    Oh and I almost forgot maybe the most important bit: there’s a difference between ‘not supporting other systems’ and ‘locking them out on purpose’. Choosing not to support other systems may be just for convenience: if they want to change something in their format they don’t have to test with every kernel build for every configuration available on the planet but just with their own, for which they undoubtedly already have all the nice setups and procedures. The previous linux-compatibility fell into the grey area between ‘Apple supported’ and ‘it works but use on your own risk’. That Apple doesn’t want to get into that grey area may be a pity for those users, but sounds like the wiser choice from a company perspective.
    That said, I’m in favor of getting devices to work with other systems: yay for options :)

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