My Fellow Americans
Archive for November, 2008
I’m Done with iPods.
The conventional Portable Media Player (PMP) sucks. Yes, I’m looking at you, iPod and Zune. It takes some left-wing thinking, but I feel it is the right one.
Story time.
I’m using a laptop, which the previous English teachers at my school have used. Upon receival, I began sifting through the files. What I first learned is that one of the teachers had been a Zune user. I looked through the music folder and was bewildered to find over 20 Gigs of music! Wow.
The teacher was an older man, so he had a lot of, what I would call classic or old bands. Some of it was good; Some of it was not. However, when I tried to play the music… It wouldn’t play. WTF. It wasn’t playing in VLC player, which is a swiss army knife of music players. What gives?
It turns out that this teacher was on the straight and narrow path. The majority of his collection was ALL legally purchased music from the Zune store. Now, there is no shame in that. It’s an honorable route. But, it’s not my route. Living in Korea away from your comfort music can be rough. Some of these older bands would be hard to find on any pirate websites. So, purchasing these albums would be the ideal choice.
However, these files are laced with DRM. Efff that, I say. This is why I couldn’t play the music with VLC player. The DRM wouldn’t allow me. “OK”, I thought, I’ll open the Zune software and listen to his music collection. Nope! I can’t do that either. To listen to the music, you have to log in with your Zune password. “Gaaahhh, foiled again!”
There were 20 Gigs of music here and none of it was playable.
… I know, right? In the end, there was nothing I could do.
/Uninstall Zune software. Goodbye. /Select all music folders and delete. Goodbye music. You are of no use to me. What a shame.
Now, let’s look at you iPod. I’ve been using you for the last 2 years and you are not without fault either. I’ve never bought music from the iTunes store. So, I wont comment on that. I still buy most of my CDs. However, all iTunes songs, also, come laced with DRM. Can I use iTunes songs with a Zune? No. Can I use iTunes songs with a Creative Zen? No. I have to use and iPod. Where’s the freedom in that?
And, dont even get me started on the quality of the song downloads. An mp3 is not a lossless file.
Secondly, I have to use that gorram program iTunes. I hate it. All I want to do is transfer MY music from MY computer to MY iPod. But, the software is so bloated. It does all of this shit that I dont want it to. I dont want you to download new updates. I dont want you to try and sync with the internet or take me to the iTunes store.
I dont even have iTunes installed on this laptop. I dont want to install it. Therefore, I can’t add new music to my iPod if I wanted to. I cant take music off either. If you go into the iPod filesystem, all the songs are garbles and unreadable if you try to take them off the iPod.
Before I came to Korea I thought about buying a new Nano. I thought about buying an iPod Touch, too, for the video capabilities. I’m glad I didn’t. There are restrictions and limitations of the video you can put on it. I dont want to spend hours converting video to the appropriate format of Apple’s choice.
The current standard is too restrictive and limited. I dont like it. There has to be a better PMP out there. And I think there is. When my nano dies, I wont go back for another one. I dont care about the ‘cool’ or ‘wow’ factor. I’m going to blast it up a notch.
