Today I joined the masses – I succumbed to the alluring call of the white earbuds and the slick interface. I am now an iPod owner.
As a card-carrying member of the geek brotherhood (should that be capitalized?), I was resisting getting an iPod for a few reasons. The lack of open standards support, the proprietary software interface and the price premium for being trendy (never a good thing for a geek) were paramount on this list. But looking around at the alternatives really depressed me, as most of them are large, chunky things. In terms of usability, there really is no way of beating this wheel interface Apple has patented – try as Apple’s competitors might.
So I’ve been coveting an iPod for many a year now, though I’ve always wanted to hold back until I could afford one that was large enough to bottle up my entire music collection. Well Apple finally made my year and discontinued one of their models – meaning price cuts for all!.
So now I’m like a kid in a candy store – though it’s a Linux candy store. I’ve found out that plugging the iPod into my Linux desktop simply worked. I was able to download an OpenSource programme called gtkpod that allows me to sync up the iPod with my music collection, thereby replacing the need for iTunes. And I didn’t have to do a thing!
Bravo to the Linux Desktop people (specifically the Project Utopia team) and the developers working on gtkpod! Now leave me to my precious.
Wow, all of a sudden the tags in my music files are of paramount importance. The iPod uses these tags to organize the music once it is loaded on it, and if things are even slightly difference, it simply considers them totally different text fields.
So for example, Love and Rockets is not the same artist as Love And Rockets.
So now I’m having to work through my years of ripping to correct my careless mistakes. Doh!
OK Kirk, commenting on your own post is just not on. I know nothing about blogs, but this is just silly. And your precious is not nearly as precious as my precious. One thing with my precious, though, is that it sorts files within a folder by file name, so I have to go through my mp3s and add “01”, “02” and so on to the beginnings of the file names. Oi.
And just to be a hypocrite, I will comment on my own comment. Why does it say that the time is 11:30 pm, when I posted it at 10:05 pm? Have you set your blog to Galapagos Islands Standard Time?
I can’t comment, as you’ll just make fun of me again…
Oh wait – damn!
For the record, I think you’re both pretty lame for commenting on your own posts. But hey, you’re both admitted geeks. I have not joined said brotherhood, since I tend to depise things made by Apple (for instance, I hate Macs).
Oh, and curses to iTunes who download their songs in mp4 format — thus making the lives of us mp3 user more difficult.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest …