[EMC]

This quote from yahoo news is the best I've seen to sum up the success of the iPod:

"The problem is that in the current state of the market, vendors at best have been offering technical equivalents of the iPod, and the iPod itself has transcended from a consumer electronics item to cultural icon," Michael Gartenberg.


I have an iPod and I like it a lot. I definitely wouldn't trade it in for any other hard-drive player even one with more features because it is cooler to have an "iPod" TM.

That said, give me a piece of paper and I could list 20 or so improvements that I would like to see in both the iPod and iTunes...

[Mafia]

your right it is cooler to have an ipod. but i think apple did it first and nothing new that has come out has had enough "sex" appeal to make people switch. In reality the others really aren't any cheaper.

[videian28]

that and the interface, no one has come to the ease of use of the iPod when it comes to amounts of songs on the player in the thousands....not even remotely close

[jlemons]

true

[willed]

Originally posted by EMC:

That said, give me a piece of paper and I could list 20 or so improvements that I would like to see in both the iPod and iTunes...

I'd like a radio built in. I know I've got all my favourite music with me, but sometimes I want something new, or sport, or talk.

Also, built in recording, at least to dictaphone quality (above this might cause copyright problems).

Other than that, apart from the obvious battery life, price and HD size wishes, I don't think anything else is too essential.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by willed:
I'd like a radio built in. I know I've got all my favourite music with me, but sometimes I want something new, or sport, or talk.

And many gyms have TVs where you can tune in to listen...

[Naplander]

If Sony allow user re-writable UMD disks, then it would pose a serious challenge to the iPod

IMO

[ort888]

The best part of the iPod is it's perfect integration with iTunes. No other player can match it's ease of use and excellent song/playlist management.

That's the selling point.

I would go with another brand in a second if it offered a better experience for the price. Who cares if it's an icon? The fact that it's an icon is actually kind of annoying.

[Superchicken]

Lets just hope Apple doesn't drop any balls soon.

[forkies]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
Lets just hope Apple doesn't drop any balls soon.

[mdc]

Originally posted by Naplander:
If Sony allow user re-writable UMD disks, then it would pose a serious challenge to the iPod

IMO

then you still have to carry around umd disks, and i think this is where the ipod (and other hard drive based players) win. because you carry around the ipod and that is it.

according to the first site i found with the size of a umd disk, is 1.8gb.
imo, the psp is not small enough to carry around along with all your umd disks to be a replacement for an ipod.

[EMC]

here's my number #1 problem with iTunes. It doesn't store music in a album-based logical format. Hear me out. I personally have 250's CDs all of which I ripped into my iTunes. Now, on my computer I can find any song, album, etc. with the iTunes search function. Unfortunately, I rarely use iTunes to listen to my music. Instead I use my downstairs stereo which gets the MP3's through my TiVo, or I use my iPod.

Both the TiVo and iPod have no "search" ability. Now here comes the problem. Say I want to listen to a band A. If I browse by artist, I see "A", "A feat. B", "A feat. C", "A and B", even though all of these "different" artists appear on the same album by "A". If you want to listen to say an Eminem track, you want to look up "Eminem". Not "Eminem featuring Dr Dre", etc. Even worse is the way files are actually stored. If I want to backup an album I have to find all of the artists that appear on the album and find all of the songs in multiple folders with the album names. This wrecks havoc for the Tivo which can only browse through the folder hierarchy.

My solution has been a big hack, and it works only for the Tivo. I have a PHP script browse through all of the MP3 tags of every song I have. It allows only one band name for each album. So, it tallies the most common name among all the tracks and creates a winamp style playlist for the album and stores the playlists in a folder with the name of this band. Futhermore, if the CD contains fewer than four tracks by the same artist, the playlist gets stored in a "various artists" folder. Effectively, you can browse by artist and get access to their whole cd. Since the TiVo can play winamp playlists, this is all great. The iPod cannot. Futhermore it can't display hierarchical playlists, so their is no way to create a "RHCP" artist playlist with album playlists inside. This glaring ommission makes it substantially more difficult to find music.

Ideally, each MP3 would have a new tag called "Album Artist". Then, you could browse by the name of the artist who is responsible for the album, not for each song in the album. An alternative would be hierarchical playlists. A third alternative would be a similar implementation to my PHP hack. At any rate, iTunes does none of these. Unfortunately, with the popularity of iTunes and the fact that the iPod depends on it, if Apple doesn't solve this problem, nobody will.

[mdc]

my solution to your problem is that when i import/buy an album which has the artist feat. another artist as the artist, i rename the offending tracks to title feat. artist and the artist to artist.

fixed it all up for me.

i understand if you have to go through every song in your collection and do this, that would take a while. but if you do it as you import/buy a new album, it is painless.

[willed]

Originally posted by EMC:
here's my number #1 problem with iTunes. It doesn't store music in a album-based logical format. Hear me out. I personally have 250's CDs all of which I ripped into my iTunes. Now, on my computer I can find any song, album, etc. with the iTunes search function. Unfortunately, I rarely use iTunes to listen to my music. Instead I use my downstairs stereo which gets the MP3's through my TiVo, or I use my iPod.

Both the TiVo and iPod have no "search" ability. Now here comes the problem. Say I want to listen to a band A. If I browse by artist, I see "A", "A feat. B", "A feat. C", "A and B", even though all of these "different" artists appear on the same album by "A". If you want to listen to say an Eminem track, you want to look up "Eminem". Not "Eminem featuring Dr Dre", etc. Even worse is the way files are actually stored. If I want to backup an album I have to find all of the artists that appear on the album and find all of the songs in multiple folders with the album names. This wrecks havoc for the Tivo which can only browse through the folder hierarchy.

My solution has been a big hack, and it works only for the Tivo. I have a PHP script browse through all of the MP3 tags of every song I have. It allows only one band name for each album. So, it tallies the most common name among all the tracks and creates a winamp style playlist for the album and stores the playlists in a folder with the name of this band. Futhermore, if the CD contains fewer than four tracks by the same artist, the playlist gets stored in a "various artists" folder. Effectively, you can browse by artist and get access to their whole cd. Since the TiVo can play winamp playlists, this is all great. The iPod cannot. Futhermore it can't display hierarchical playlists, so their is no way to create a "RHCP" artist playlist with album playlists inside. This glaring ommission makes it substantially more difficult to find music.

Ideally, each MP3 would have a new tag called "Album Artist". Then, you could browse by the name of the artist who is responsible for the album, not for each song in the album. An alternative would be hierarchical playlists. A third alternative would be a similar implementation to my PHP hack. At any rate, iTunes does none of these. Unfortunately, with the popularity of iTunes and the fact that the iPod depends on it, if Apple doesn't solve this problem, nobody will.

[Dalhectar]

Originally posted by mdc:
my solution to your problem is that when i import/buy an album which has the artist feat. another artist as the artist, i rename the offending tracks to title feat. artist and the artist to artist.

fixed it all up for me.

i understand if you have to go through every song in your collection and do this, that would take a while. but if you do it as you import/buy a new album, it is painless.

If you do that, tracks won't show up in iMix, where Apple searches by artist and expects the feat. etc. Minor point, but there might be other ways in the future that iTMS links with your existing iTunes Library, and if they do then the difference between the name of the artist in iTMS and your iTunes library becomes significant.

But in general the iPod/iTunes is supposed to provide as much of a turn key experience as possible. I side with EMC, it would be great if Apple had a separate Album Artist section.

My personal solution is to browse by Album, all the songs of that album appear regardless of artist.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Honestly I think it really comes down to the design and simplicity.

Other manufacturers like to cram every feature they can like radio's, OLED screens and voice recording but most people just want a simple clean device that plays music.

I found my 3G 15 gig to overcomplicated so I sold it for a shuffle which I am MUCH happier with.

[Dale Sorel]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Honestly I think it really comes down to the design and simplicity.

Yea, kinda like their computers... gosh that didn't take very long to catch on

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by Dale Sorel:
Yea, kinda like their computers... gosh that didn't take very long to catch on

But Microsoft hasn't handed out free MP3 players that look and function similarly to the iPod yet.

Slight difference.

[nredman]

iPod - Too Cool For School.

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by nredman:
iPod - Too Cool For School.

iPod - SWEET! It's... incredible!

[Krusty]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
Lets just hope Apple doesn't drop any balls soon.

Yes, I like their voice at high pitch.

On another interesting note, looks like the iPod is a runaway success ..... on the Microsoft main campus in Redmond.

About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering."

The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus. "This irks the management team no end," said the source.

......

Robert Scoble, who calls himself the "Microsoft Geek Blogger" and is one of the company's most widely read and vocal mouthpieces, sometimes appears obsessed with the iPod.

He recently penned an open letter to Bill Gates about how to build an iPod-killer (first thing: start a blog). "Even I want an iPod," he confessed.

The Microsoft manager said he's heard from several executives who dutifully bought Microsoft-powered players, tried them, failed to get them working, and returned them in favor of an iPod. He went through the same experience, he said.

[CD Hanks]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
Lets just hope Apple doesn't drop any balls soon.

HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Idiocy aside, the problem with having a cultural icon is that they eventually go out of style. Lets hope Apple can cope with this when it happens (and it will.)

[turtle777]

They are all DOA.

-t