I hate Ipods!

The ipod has always been overrated in my opinion. I am thoroughly convinced of this after buying an ipod classic 160 GB player. In fact, I call it the iPOS: i Piece of Shit.

I am using realplayer to manage my ipod, not itunes. I have a music library of well over 3000 CDs and my MP3 library is around 34000 songs! I still have around 100 vinyl records (from a time when I had around 800). Not everything I own is on my computer, yet. I can't really use things like napster, kazaa, morpheus, or any of those other file sharing databases because people will be draining MY computer. The first time I logged on one of these programs, some hog was downloading a whole album from me within the first minute. That stopped me from being able to do anything in the world of file sharing.

Now, Itunes will sync my unit with every song on my computer which is well over the directory capacity of 160 GB. Anyway, I don't really want to have my whole collection on disc, just a few songs (it was at 16k songs when my iPOS last crashed). The songs show up if I use windows explorer, but the iPOS won't recognise that they are there. It does recognise that there is data which is occupyiing 74 GB of space, but it refuses to be able to do anything.

The apple solution is to obliterate all this data and force me to reload. This is a task which will take me over two days. Even if I am not sitting at my computer, this occupies loads of computer time.

Now, I just called apple and they said that they do not support me if I am not using itunes to manage my iPOS. So, basically, they are not willing to make a unit that will self-repair the library from what I am understanding.

I own a couple of other MP3 players, and my living room computer is technically a giant MP3 player (with over 36k songs on it). Every other MP3 player can self repair the library, such as my Toshiba Gigabeat or creative zen nomad. Not the IPOS!

The worst part of this is that there are software programs out there which claim they can repair my song database, but they don't work with the iPOS classic. This is kind of amazing to me. Actually, I am obviously not alone as there are several programs out there and multitudes of posts from others who have lost their data due to a corrupt iPOD database.

On the other hand, I think the iPOS is one of the most over hyped units on the market, which is too stinking bad. I would strongly advise anyone not to get this, but Toshiba and creative are not the market force that apple is when it comes to MP3 players. And finding an MP3 player with this type of capacity is really difficult. That is the only reason I bought the iPOS, which I am truly regretting.

The other units with similar capacity are the Archos, DMC xclef, and Wolverine Data. You can find some creative zen nomads that have been rebuilt with larger drives. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the technology exists for me to carry my music collection with me, the marketplace hasn't caught up with it. Worse, its pretty hard to find other units besides the iPOS out there that do work in terms of having enough disc capacity for a minimum of songs, such as the Gigabeat or Creative coming in at 40-60GB.

So, the iPOS has mostly marketing working for it and not much else. In fact, the iPOS is pretty much another case of monopolising the market which is surprising coming from Apple, which tries to come off as not being Microsoft. In the case of the iPOS, Apple has done everything to hype its unit, but really isn't offering a product which is worth buying.

So, if you haven't wasted your money on a iPOS with a huge disc drive, don't. Go looking for a product which actually functions.

This is only a part of my anti-iPOS rant, but it is a very significant complaint, which I hope Apple, or some clever software developer will fix.