Ipod Classic Firmware 1.0.2--Nothing New

Finally an update. But still no fixes to the problems I've been experiencing. Itunes still freezes. Albums with various artists are still displayed multiple times in Cover Flow. Albums with the same title still have their songs grouped together.

And now another bug I've noticed: the Classic sometimes displays the wrong album art. Itunes displays the right album art but the Ipod does not.

Geez.

I wonder what problems I'll find if I used this for stuff other than music.

A Classic Experience Ep. 3--Bugs

It's my third week with my Ipod Classic. While I love its looks, capacity and ease of use, I've been noticing more and more bugs as I go along. A lot of users have been experiencing the same things at Ilounge.

Have mentioned previously that Itunes freezes randomly with the Classic connected? I have to mention it again. Whether adding or deleting songs, editing tags or just plain searching through the Ipod's contents or scrolling through the song list, I guarantee you, Itunes will freeze.

Also there are more bugs about Cover Flow than the Various Artists problem. Different albums with the same album title appear together under one album art. To illustrate: I have an Alice in Chains album titled Unplugged and an 10,000 Maniacs album also titled Unplugged. In Cover Flow I select the first album. The Ipod then lists the songs from both albums.

WTF?

There's an easy enough solution though: I rename both albums and include the artist name in the album title.

One more thing. I play a Tori Amos song. The Ipod displays the song info along with the album art but it does not play. I hit pause then play. It still does not play. I check with the original file on my PC and it plays. Argh.

A Classic Experience Ep. 2-- Cover Flow

The Cover Flow browsing mode is one of the major selling points of the Ipod Classic over other MP3 players. It is however painfully slow if your music library is composed of hundreds of albums--which is why most people would get an 80gb MP3 player in the first place.

While I don't have any benchmarks to show any speed difference, I do recommend resizing your album art to around 300 to 350 pixels. There's no point to high res album art on that small screen. Naturally it would take longer to the load high res pics.

One more thing to note: albums with various artists will be displayed multiple times in cover flow, once for every artist. It can be very annoying to see a soundtrack cover appear over and over again.

I've heard a lot of complaints about this in the Ilounge forums. Hopefully Apple gets to fix these problems soon.

A Classic Experience

It's been a long time since my last post. Blame it on the Ipod Classic. At $250, I got 80gb of storage--enough to store all the MP3s I've managed to collect in 5 years and video playback too.

First impressions first. It looks slim and feels handy. It still however feels like a hard-drive-based MP3 player so there's always the constant fear that dropping it means saying goodbye not only to the backup of my music collection but the $250 as well. Until Apple produces an 80gb, flash-based Ipod for under 300 bucks, this thing will stay only at home, while my Shuffle comes with me wherever I go.

Once turned on, there's the familiar Ipod interface that even newbies can quickly navigate. The only added feature over the 5th Gen model is the constantly present album art (provided your music is properly tagged with it). Looking for music either using Cover Flow or browsing through artists, albums or genres feels like browsing through actual CDs. And seeing random album art scrolling by the main menu can remind you to listen to an old favorite.

The sound quality, to my ears, using the stock earbuds is top notch. If there's anyone claiming that it sucks, he's probably just high on placebo.

Really the only bad thing about this Ipod is... Itunes. The newest version which is a requirement is as slow as watching paint dry on a rainy day. This on a Athlon X2 3600+ with 2gb of ram. (And no, I don't have any spyware.) The only relief to me is that once I have my music properly tagged with MP3tag and transferred using Itunes I can uninstall it finally.