I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
So I’ve travelled full circle in the past few weeks.
My goal was to have my iPod fully functional with my Windows PC. My preference was to not use iTunes rather just Windows Media Player.
Why?
- So I don’t have two music programs that store their information in different places fighting each other.
- The UI for iTune’s, while pretty, is far from Windows standard (no surprise there).
I removed iTunes and was pleased to see that Media Player 10 found the iPod with no additional software. Also SauceReader made it easy to pull down podcasts which I could save in a Podcast directory. Not a bad alternative to iTunes which is a pretty but unintuitive podcast interface. Definitely some rushed out software.
However Windows Media Player did not sync all my music to the iPod (strange) and seemed to need to convert everything (even mp3’s). Stranger.
The final straw was installing the iTrip, which requires either iTunes or Music Match to give you the stations list. Suck!
So reluctantly I’ve given up and reinstalled iTunes. I’ve compared notes with other iTunes users and I think we’re starting to figure out the PodCasting UI. Hopefully we’ll get an update soon.
iTrip works well.
Conclusion. It’s hard to get a satisfying iPod experience without iTunes. SJ has successfully used the iPod to infiltrate my computing experience.
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