iPod Troubles

So, those that know me probably already know my feeling on Macs. I won't get into that right now. The only Apple product(s) I own are iPod(s). I use parentheses because I actually own two, but one of them is currently being used by Leesa after hers crapped out. For Christmas, PARTsolutions was nice enough to gift me with an 8 GB iPod Touch. So far, it has been really handy in its limited use.

The reason it gets limited use is that as cool as the touch screen is, it is impractical for most of what I use an iPod for. Mostly, I use my iPod at the gym, and I don't want to listen to every song on there, but I don't really make many playlists. So my general procedure is to put it on shuffle, and every time a song comes on I don't want to listen to, I just hit the skip button until I come to a song I want.

The problem with the touch screen, then, is that I have to look at the iPod to use the skip. Of course, I usually have to slide the little bar to unlock it too. With the Nano, I just reach down, press the button, and voila, next song. It's so much quicker and easier WITHOUT the touch screen to me. The Touch is really great, but only when I am in a static state. On a plane ride, for example, it is exquisite. The best feature of the Touch is that it has a large screen for watching movie and TV. Definitely a lifesaver.

The other beautiful feature of the iPod is that it works. Simply. Bring your music into iTunes, plug in your iPod, and magically all your music is there for you to enjoy. However, this morning, for whatever reason, my iPod Touch did not want to work. Now, it might have been something else I was doing, but it was a definite breakdown in the ease of use. When I plug in the pod, I want it to sync to whatever is in my current iTunes library. This morning, I had roughly 4.6 GB of videos and 2.6 GB of music in my iTunes. For you math majors, that's 7.2 GB worth of stuff for an 8 GB iPod. Should have plenty of room for everything, right? Wrong. It kept telling me that I didn't have enough space.

Surely this was just a mistake, and easily fixed, right? Well, I unplugged it, plugged it back in (my IT solution for everything), same message. Now, I had some videos on the iPod already that I had deleted from my iTunes, because I was done with them and wanted them gone. But for whatever reason, it didn't want to get rid of them and put the new ones on there. It was simply fixed by just deleting them from the iPod. But I seem to remember in the past that it would all be done automagically.

The other breakdown I have seen with the iPod, and again I do not know that it is really the fault of the iPod, is that it is a huge pain to get videos onto it. All the videos I have are in AVI format, and they have to be converted to mpeg4 to work on my iPod. This is actually a very time-consuming and frustrating process, especially as most programs to do it are not free, and the two I have found that are do not always work as I want. One of them will frequently tell me my AVI files are NOT video streams and cannot be converted. The other one is a massive resource hog. They both convert at about 1:1 speed, so it takes a long time to convert a lot of things. Generally I queue it up before bed, so no real problem there. But yesterday I had to watch whatever was on TV at the gym b/c we didn't want to wait for Transformers to finish converting.

In the end, these are not end of the world issues - just a slight disappointment to find something that always simply worked decided to let me down this morning.