It means that I had to wait an hour for the patches that didn’t work anyways, this was a few years ago, so I’m sure there have been some integrations. It simply would not work. No matter your protestations, it simply did not function.
Sounds like a problem with your dial-up at the time. And clicking the “Help” menu.
You’re still not making much sense. Yes, it’s a big program and takes a long time to download it through a dialup connection, was that your main gripe? But you say it still didn’t work - did it not install, or what?
I’ve been using iTunes on all my Windows systems ever since I got my first iPod, a second-generation 20GB model. I do remember I had trouble installing it on a Vista system when Vista was first released, but many other software had that problem with Vista, and it was corrected in the next version. I don’t recall having any other problems with iTunes. I’m not particularly enamored with it, but I haven’t seen any evidence to completely dismiss it as “a mess” and claim it “just wouldn’t work.”
Well, it’s a good thing I don’t have to rely on Apple’s proprietary and inflexible gateway, babysitting, program called iTunes, anymore. I’ll go with the versatility and simplicity of drag and drop, and unlimited possibilities. I don’t need your stinkin’ program.
A neat thing you can do now is disable the sync music feature without even having the device plugged in (which makes sense, it was stupid to have it risk wiping your ipod because the setting on the device being on the default sync setting). In iTunes->iTunes menu->Preferences->Devices->Disable Automatic Syncing for iPhones and iPods
Weirdly, not all of our ipods show up in the menu, but it shouldn’t matter if you have that little box checked.
And strangely, devilsknew that weird defensive offense is the attitude that drove me back to iTunes after I tried to use a Creative mp3 player. I had a simple enough problem and posted in the Creative support forum after exhausting all their help page options and not finding the solution. I stated simply what I wanted to do, what I had tried, and solicited help politely, TIA and all that and got back a single response, something like: “Well, that what u get when u use shitty itunes to import tough luck lolmao.”
Real nice. And a complete departure from the patient help you get when dealing with an apple issue, as demonstrated in this thread.
I get that you don’t want have to defend ad nauseam an opinion formed through a brief but frustrating experience you had a couple years ago, though. Sometimes people can be too helpful, and it’s not like you’re going to have an attitude 180 and start using and loving iTunes. It is a bit limited (although the limitations seem to be more “oh, I didn’t know I could do that by doing this!”) and it’s a little slow and the constantly changing drm weirdness can sometimes be a stumbling block. But I think it’s a great program for managing my music and audiobooks and it gets better all the time (for a while there though, last year or so? it seemed like there was a new update every time I fired it up, which got a little old) while working seamlessly with my content providers. I didn’t have a problem using it on my PCs, and now I have a Macbook, and there isn’t much difference between using iTunes on a PC and iTunes on a Mac that I can see. Just that the Mac is all around easier, no constantly updating pop-ups and alerts, no having to clear off mounds of pre-loaded “free trial” garbage from the hard drive, etc, but that’s not a difference with iTunes, just a difference between the Mac and the PCs we have/had.
Totally not the place for it, but speaking of iTunes limitations: I know that before you import a disc, say if you’re importing an audiobook disc, you can join the tracks, but does anyone know how to join all the tracks of an audiobook together as one, across multiple CDs? Someone just told me about changing the extension on these tracks to m4b so it knows it’s a book and doesn’t shuffle them in with the music, but to have these all joined into one big book file like my audible files are so it does a bookmark would be great.
Thanks for the posts. I won’t be able to digest it all now but I’ll come back later and read the posts. At first I did not want to specify how I was going to use it. I wanted to hear your opinions without it being tailored to my situation. I will probably get most my use out of it at the gym (lifting and cardio) but I want to be able to have fun with it elsewhere. Assume any price within the Ipod inventory is OK. I have no desire to get an Iphone but anything else is good. I’m probably not going to be interested in the shuffle, not enough bells and whistles. I’ll be back with some questions later.
AFAIK, it is perfectly legal to use another program besides iTunes to populate your iPod. Before my 3rd generation iPod’s battery died, I used a program called Ephpod.
And OP: I can’t recommend the Shuffle as long as it doesn’t have a screen. Picking songs on one is quite annoying, IME.
:smack:
How did I go all this time without hearing that the iPod Touch includes free wi-fi? I thought the point was simply that it has a big touch-screen useful for games and videos, which seemed like a relatively unimportant toy compared to the huge hard drive on the cheaper iPod Classic.
So now I’ve got my two week old 120GB Classic, which was a lovely birthday gift from Dad, and which I was totally thrilled with until a couple hours ago. Damn. Given that it’s not feasible for me to sell it and put the proceeds towards a Touch, I kinda wish I hadn’t found out about this.
Just to be clear, the free wifi thing is just that if there’s a wifi network around you can access it–it isn’t like the Kindle with the built in internet access free because of a cellular thingummy.
Still, it’s like a teeny little netbook.
The Touch is capable of wi-fi. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s free to use. It will work with your home wi-fi setup and of course not cost extra for you to connect. There may be other free wi-fi places in your locality. There will also be some that will charge you to use their connection.
I use a $10 program called Audiobook Builder. Using it, I can take a book on CD and turn it into an audiobook file like this:
[ul]
[li]Import the CD’s into iTunes. It’s easier if you join the tracks to match the book’s chapters at this point, but not necessary.[/li][li]Select the entire imported book in iTunes, then open Audiobook builder.[/li][li]Create a new project, then fill out the Title and Author fields. You can drag-and-drop artwork for the cover at this point, if you want.[/li][li]On the next screen, click “Add iTunes.” This will import the selected tracks from iTunes automatically.[/li][li]Use the “Join” and “Split” buttons as needed to set up the chapters within the book the way you want them. If you joined the tracks by chapter when importing into iTunes, there’s not much to this step.[/li][li]Click “Finish.” The program will run for quite a while as it does it’s magic, but when it’s done, it will have merged all the files into an audiobook, complete with chapter guides and artwork, and imported it into iTunes for you.[/li][li]At this point, you can delete the individual tracks you ripped in the first step.[/li][/ul]
As you noted above, you can do a lot of this without this program by joining the tracks and renaming the file extension. But this program does all that, and creates a pretty polished single audiobook, complete with the internal bookmarks.
Oh, that’s great! Perfect! Thank you so much! (I do wish iTunes or Garageband even could just do it, but ten bucks is totally worth it, thank you!)
One more exclamation point for good measure! 
Living in New York City as I do, does anyone know just what kind of wifi coverage there is around town? On a random street in Manhattan, what are the odds that my iPod Touch would be able to piggy-back on a nearby wifi signal? What about the outer-buroughs? I’ve never carried around a laptop or some such, so I’m pretty ignorant about this sort of thing.
Well, Bryant Park has free wireless, and if you buy something at a Starbucks using their card, you can get 30 days of free wireless at any of their locations. I don’t know about just anywhere on the street, as it would probably depend on what block & where.
Here’s a place to start: http://ilovefreewifi.com/manhattan/