Well, I got my brand spankin new 32GB 2nd gen iPod Touch safely protected in the cool RebelTouch case. Goofed up on the first screen protector and now I know why they give you two ;-)
The first think I noticed was how slow and bloated iTunes was. It often just kinda annoyingly sits there churning away at something with little info on what it is really doing. The one thing I’ve figured out is that iTunes essentially acts like it’s a device unto itself. First you have to get your songs all set up in iTunes, THEN you can put them on your iPod. It is not an app whose sole purpose is to transfer songs from your PC to the player device. This is WAY different than say a Creative Zen or Sansa Fuze where you just drag your music from your PC to the device and your’e done.
I find it odd that it ignores the “A” in band names like “A Change of Pace” and groups them with the C’s. I spent an hour thinking I was having syncing issues!!! I can understand ignoring “The”, like in “The Beatles”, but why “A”??? Stupid.
Took me a while to figure out that the Library is not the same as the Music folder and there is no way to automatically sync the two. I was thinking that logically it would place all the music in the physical folder in the Library, but no such feature as far as I can tell. What I wanted to do was place new MP3s in the folder and automatically sync that with the Library and utimately the iPod. I’ll just have to keep them in sync manually.
Since I’ve got a spare 32 gigs on my hard drive, I’m putting a copy all of the music I want to load on my iPod in a special folder on my hard drive, which I use as my iTunes Music folder. Then I load that music into the Library. Basically, the Library and the folder will be identical. I turned off manual sync, so my Library will be automatically synced with my iPod. If I ever need to reformat my iPod, restoring will be pretty easy. I guess I could add my original songs to the Library, but I worry about what iTunes might do to them and I feel safer if it only has access to a copy. Note that I’m only using unDRM’d music.
Well now that I’ve got my Library set up, I should have an easier time with things since I’ll only be dealing with a handful of songs at a time. The initial set up anything is usually rough and this was no exception.
Just tried the trick where you turn off sending data to Apple which is supposed to speed up syncing. It does appear faster.
I got rid of my N800 for the Touch and I do miss having access to shared Windows folders and background processing, but that’s about it. The Touch’s browser is pretty good though it sorely needs Flash support. Supposedly that may be coming. I hope so. Pandora app is very nice, but too bad you can’t run it in the background. How stupid. The closed world of Apple is very evident and irritating; however, the stuff you can do there is still pretty cool. Kinda like going to Disneyland. You can have a lot of fun there, but you can only have fun in the ways they want you to have fun.
Oh yeah, I cannot connect to my DLink DIR-655 router using WPA! It appears that many others are having the same issues and the only fix is a firmware upgrade. Hope Apple is listening. Fortunately, I’ve got a Linksys router acting as an AP and I have no problems connecting to that.