Posted by Woody on 12/31/05 21:37

Timothy J. Trace <tim@nospam.co.uk> wrote:

> On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 19:37:31 +0000, usenet@alienrat.co.uk (Woody)
> wrote:
>
> >So you got an iPod shuffle at 9:30, thought 'for some reason I want to
> >use this iPod shuffle without iTunes' and by 9:36 you had all your songs
> >on it?
>
> Thanks for not being mean :>
>
> In your example, I would say that the time from 9:00 to 9:30 was spent
> opening boxes and trying to figure out the shuffle paradigm. Once I
> had all the ducks in a row, I performed and repeated the procedure
> twice to be certain that it was working before I trained my wife. No
> more than 6 minutes in either instance.
>
> I'm a previous iPod owner. I've had a 4G 20GB and 1 1G Mini 4GB for
> nearly a year. I've never used iTunes. From the very start I've only
> synced my players using Ephpod, and I wanted the wife's new shuffle to
> sync with Ephpod, also. Unfortunately, as I discovered last night,
> Ephpod does not support the iPod shuffle, and there are no plans to
> add that compatibility.

I would imagine that as the shuffle is a very different device, it would
probably complicate ephpod (which I have used) to add it.

> One reason I sync with Ephpod is that I prefer to keep all of my media
> in a single server-side directory where my LinkSys WMA11B can see all
> of it.

I keep all my media on my server, although I keep subsets of it on other
computers as well for convenience.

> Another reason is that keeping everything on the server allows
> me to access my music from whichever of my workstations or notebooks
> that I happen to be logged into at any given moment.

Same here.

> Unless iTunes has changed, and *please* correct me if I'm wrong, songs
> that you download to the player are not backed up on the host PC. Lose
> the player, lose the music.

Are you refering to music bought from the iTunes music store? They are
wherever you put them. Lose the player and the songs stay wherever they
were to start with, although if they are itunes files, you might lose
one count of them (I don't know - I don't have any downloaded files
apart from the free ones).

> Or, to stretch the analogy, no WMA11B
> connected to the player, no iTunes songs on the home entertainment
> system. And, no, I don't believe you can connect a WMA11B to an iPod,
> anyway.

I am not entirely with you here. iTunes and the music are separate
entities. There are files downloaded from the iTunes music store which
are protected, and there are files ripped from your CDs that are mp3s or
aacs or whatever. They are all independant of itunes or your iPod.

> Admittedly this leaves me out of the loop with regards to cutting edge
> music, and stuff that is not represented in my collection. I
> currently don't buy downloadable music. I'm making a statement of
> some kind. Well, perhaps: I've ripped almost 500 discs from my
> collection using Exact Audio Copy and LAME, and I populate my players
> from those rips.

I don't buy downloadable music with drm on it. I have bought some music
from artists websites as mp3s ( i recently bought a sarah mclachlan
album on mp3 from her website) but if the only choice is drm it is
easier to buy it from play.com and rip it - If I am going to buy music I
don't want to be told where I am going to play it.

> The last thing I need is an outlet where I can toss away $1 per song
> on new stuff and rarities...I'll be broke within a week :>

Same here.

> As for missing out on the functionality of iTunes, that's not a huge
> concern, but I'll grant that I don't know much about iTunes. What I
> have now with Ephpod, etc, works well and is not all that much more
> complicated than what I imagine iTunes to be.

I think you are mistaking what iTunes is - it is just a music player,
that can connect to the iTunes store, but it doesn't have to.
You stick a CD in, press the import button, it rips it and puts it in
your library (where you have told it to put them). You can get it to
sync with your iPod if you want or you can just pick up tracks and dump
them on the iPod (which appears in the list when connected). It also can
sync contacts/photos/videos etc.

I have 4 computers with iTunes and 3 iPods - none of them sync with each
other, I just copy tracks around (and cross convert to make mp3 cds for
my car stereo). iTunes works well and is not a problem on either the Mac
or the PC.
It also completes the whole iPod experience - yes, you can download
whatever and write scripts to copy things and set things up if you want,
but with iTunes, you just rip files and dump them on the iPod, job done.



--
Woody
Alienrat Design Ltd

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