Tag: iPod

While I don’t own any computers from Apple (unless you want to count my iPod); I have friends that do and so I tend to follow any news about them. Today at MacWorld Expo 2005, Steve Jobs announced many things but in particular he announced 2 products that sound very interesting in deed. I’m speaking of the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini. The first interests me as my iPod is an older model with less battery life than I’m happy about (plus, I think it would make a cool birthday gift for the fiance). The second is interesting for a number of reasons:

  • It’s a Mac and it’s affordable.
  • If it’s really as quiet as they’re saying; it could make a great computer to put next to the TV, for watching video files off my server1.
  • It’s smaller than the phone on my desk at work!
  • Did I mention it’s affordable?

Of course, these products have only just been announced and aren’t available just yet. Not that I’ve got the money to buy either one right now. *sigh*

1 For the record, those video files are episodes of fan-subbed anime that haven’t been licensed in the US yet.

Spiffy! iPeter’s Blog is a new blog by a guy who developed a script for Windows users of iTunes to automagically pull in MP3s from various music blogs via their RSS feeds. Kudos to the Inquirer for the link.

Note to Self: Set this up as soon as you get home!

2004-09-03, 09:18 (GMT: -06:00): I tried this script out last night and it works great! Now, I just need to go back and find more RSS feeds for music/audioblogs worth listening to.

I started trying to backup all my music from my iPod to DVD-Rs last night and K3B said it successfully burned all the files straight from the iPod to disc, but upon looking at the disc; it was obviously a bad burn (only the center of the disc had “grooves”). I was busy with other things and didn’t get a chance to work on this any further than that last night.

Today while I was home for lunch, I tried playing around with iTunes & the iPod under Windows some more; it’s free single Tuesday, after all! Initially I didn’t have much luck but I did some more searching online and found more suggestions. Most of them didn’t look very helpful or promising, but one said to drop the iPod into the dock, disconnect the dock from the computer and reconnect it.

For whatever reason, that worked! Yeah baby! I got the new free single and a bunch of MP3s I downloaded the other day; so now I’m good to go with additional music. *joy* 🙂

Over the weekend, I started visiting some MP3 blogs and downloading some of the free tracks out there for extra listening material on my iPod. Today over lunch, I booted my home computer into Windows; so I could transfer those tracks to the iPod1. However it seems I’ve been biten by a bug in the iTunes/iPod software.

See, iTunes wouldn’t launch with the iPod connected; it would start in the background but wouldn’t display the GUI (at least it wouldn’t do it quick enough to satisfy me). If I disconnected the iPod, launched iTunes, reconnected the iPod then iTunes would continue to run but would fail to see the iPod. I tried dinking around with this for a while (rebooting, disconnecting, reconnecting, checking for updates and whatnot) but didn’t get any closer to having iTunes recognize the iPod. Though at one point an error message did pop-up telling me I needed to reformat the iPod.

I started searching Apple’s website, as I remembered hearing that there was an issue like this back in April when the last update for iTunes/iPod was released. The most info I could find basically told me to backup, reformat the iPod and try again. *sigh*

That’s not something I really wanted to hear. I guess tonight I’ll be booting back into Linux; backing up the data from the iPod to DVD-Rs and then trying some more drastic measures to get the iPod working right again.

Oh and the other reason I’m upset with iTunes; is that I forgot to go buy some songs from them over the weekend and hence had zero chance to win a free Powerbook. *double sigh*

1 For the record, I am familiar with gtkPod but it gives me errors everytime I try and get it just to read from my iPod which makes me disinclined to use it to write to the iPod.