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Review 4 of 35
Price Paid:
$399.00
from Internet Summary: Overall decent hardware, terrible software. I am suprised this product became so popular. Strengths: You can do far better on MP-3 players. The Ipod itself is decent. The battery lasts a long time, the wheel interface is handy, although you should be able to scroll backwards and zoom straight to the end of a list instead of having to wheel through an entire massive list to find what you want. Weaknesses: The headphones are crap.
The main limitation with the otherwise decent player is that you are not allowed to pull songs off the ipod once you put them on. You can delete them on itunes and it will pull them off that way, but you cant hook your ipod to someone elses computer and allow them to pull songs off. That is stupid. It also means that if you have a hard drive crash and have to re-install itunes, it will install with a blank library, and will eliminate your entire song library the first time you update the ipod.WTF???!!!
You can (and should) buy third party software to allow this feature, but for what you pay for an ipod it should be a standard feature.
The main problem comes with the itunes computer program. Its probably the worst music management system I have seen. Heres a short and incomplete summary of the problems I have experienced. First off, it totally crashed my system upon initial install. The damage to my registry was so bad I was forced to do a disk reformat and complete system re-install. Thats a great task to face as you are trying to get your new ipod working. Once I got everything together I was exposed to the joys of Itunes. It is difficult to import songs into it. I tried copying a big library off of an external drive, and it blocked that effort.
Song management is difficult. You can create and use playlists, but its far more intricate and complex than something like windows media player. It lists files differently than windows media player, Kazza, or any other system, so you won't get them arranged like they would be in windows.
Its a very fussy program. My version of Itunes regularly locks up. It will hang up for random reasons and will take 5-10 minutes until it becomes responsive, or requires a hard shutdown through the Windows task manager. Its the most trouble prone program I have ever had from a major software source (by an order of magnitude).
Lastly, when you play a disk from your CD collection to add to your itunes library it converts it to an mp4 (not an mp3). Nothing but itunes will play it. It works fine in itunes, but try playing that selection on Windows Media Player. Its a big no-go.
Overall I like the player, but the software is terrible and it has been a source of great frustration trying to make it do what its supposed to do. I expected far better for my money. If I had to do it again I would have bought another MP-3 player with similar features.
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