Up until a week or so ago I used 91.5 as my iTrip frequency in Melbourne. Most of my driving is in the inner West and inner East and it worked fine until ‘Vega 91.5‘ muscled in on my bandwidth.

I’ve now switched to 95.3 and it seems to work okay. Anyone else have suggestions for frequencies that work well in Melbourne?

I have a love/hate relationship with my iPod. (It’s a 40Gb 4th generation model.)

Why I love my iPod

The design is exquisite. The whole thing is beautiful. Even the power adapter is beautiful.

I’ve never had an MP3 player before, and I love using it.

Lock button: brilliant. Click wheel menu system: easy.

Bung a CD into the PC, it gets the track names from CDDB, rips it easily.

Syncing music is fast and easy via USB 2.

There’s some very nifty addons available for it.

Get a good tune on it, pump up the volume, and I’m in heaven. You should have seen me dancing around the kitchen last night.

Why I hate my iPod

Can’t use it with more than one PC. 40Gb of portable storage in my pocket, and I can’t use it for moving files. (There are shareware tools to do this.)

It has no radio.

Yesterday Windows was recognising it as a drive, not an iPod. iTunes then complained another user was using it. I had to reboot to fix it. Maybe it works better with Macs, but I shouldn’t have to buy one to find out.

It didn’t come with a belt-clip. Okay, so maybe that would spoil the design. So I put it in a skin. The skin is pretty cool, but it doesn’t look as nice as it does out of the skin.

Maybe I haven’t been careful enough with the headphones, but the wire got pulled obviously a bit too hard on one earpiece, and now there’s a little interference from it. My cheapie Sony earphones are tougher, if not as visually appealing.

It doesn’t play WMA. I’m not totally enamoured of WMA, but it’s the only thing offered by online music stores in Australia, since there are continual delays with the iTunes Music Store AU.

There are almost constant horror stories of people having their iPods freeze up, batteries die, or other hassles.

All of these hassles seem to result in the iPod going off to the iPod hospital and coming back empty.

iTunes can’t work through the firewall at work, at least for CDDB lookups.

iTunes on Windows follows the Quicktime example of Apple trying to make their software look like Mac. If I wanted a metallic grey window title bar (which slightly changes shades of grey when it has focus), I’d have changed it to be that way in my Windows settings.

Conclusion

This is my first MP3 player. It works, and I’m not even considering of replacing it while it works. But if I had the choice over again, I’d buy another brand. I don’t know which, but it wouldn’t be Apple. In line with my movie reviews getting a thumbs up or thumbs down, I give the iPod a thumbs down.

Update Thursday 8am. Great feedback about some of these issues in the comments. Thank you all, I’ll be investigating further.

The latest version of iTunes has been released overnight. Unfortunately there’s still no music store for Australia but you can, at last, synch your podcasts directly from within its interface. This may spell the end of the nascent podcatchers industry but should prove a boon for Cameron’s The Podcast Network.

Update

And this just spotted on the BBC site :

A software update for the click-wheel iPods and the iPod minis will offer a podcast menu, including bookmarking and the ability to show podcast artwork.

You can get the iPod updater here : Ipod Updater

Update

No way of importing your existing OPML or adding your own custum feed that I can see at a quick glance.

Another Update

I should have RTFM. You can add your own podcast by entering the URL under the ‘Advanced | Subscribe to Podcast’ option.

Turns out it is possible to copy songs from an iPod back to a computer. Tony found this article which details how: in summary, you hook up the Pod, and your computer should be able to see a drive containing its contents.

In Windows you’ll need to display Hidden Files. Look for the ipodcontrol/music directory, and copy it back to your hard drive.

On a Mac, do a cp from the command line: cp -R /Volumes/youriPodName/iPod_Control/Music DestinationPath

There’s a catch: Since the iPod isn’t registered on my computer, when I connect, iTunes pipes up to ask me if I want to wipe the Pod. After you’ve replied “Hell, no” the drive doesn’t show up in Explorer. What you have to do is leave that iTunes dialog unanswered while you copy the files.

Once the files are on your hard drive, you can import them back into iTunes, though you’ll find the tracks are stored in a bunch of different directories, and dammit if iTunes makes you add them one directory at a time.

Still, it works, and it means not only can I wipe the Pod and copy everything over again, but in future I don’t have to keep all those tracks on my PC if I need the diskspace.

In other iPod news, Apple is set to offer US$50 gift vouchers to early iPod battery victims.

For iPod owners contemplating purchasing an iTrip, pause a second.

I’ve been unhappy with my iPod battery life pretty much since I purchased it six months ago. Finally I’d had enough and sent it off to Apple support to be checked. It took them three weeks to run a one day test and the test showed it was fine. They sent it back and, $20 later, I had my same iPod that still seemed to have a battery life considerably shorter than the promoted 12 hours.

It was only a few days later I realised what was wrong.

a) I mainly use my iPod in the car to and from work.
b) I use a Griffin iTrip
c) The iTrip FAQ told me ” it uses VERY little power from the iPod and has no real effect on battery life”.

It was believing C that cost me $20 and no iPod for almost a month.

I finally twigged that C may not be correct so I ran my own test.

I kept the volume level the same for each day, set it to shuffle play and did not touch the unit until the battery expired.

Day 1 – iPod, no headphones. Batteries lasted 11.5 hours
Day 2 – iPod with iTrip. Batteries lasted 7.5 hours (No power bars visible for about the last hour so it looked as though it had run out after 6)
Day 3 – iPod with headphones attached. 11 hours.

Now this is very unscientific and a sample size of one but the iTrip reduced my iPod battery life by approx 32% – that seems a lot more than a ‘VERY little’ reduction to me.

Okay okay, I admit it, when my USB port at home was suspect, I loaded up my new iPod at work. Now I’ve got a new computer, I plugged the iPod into it, and fired up iTunes. I didn’t expect this:

No two ways about it, that plain sucks.

I know Apple probably needed to show it was providing a degree of copy protection to get the co-operation to set up the iTunes store, but really, this is stupid. They could have at least allowed you to connect the iPod to a handful of computers.

There is an alternative: a Winamp plugin called ml-iPod which lets you copy tracks to the Pod without that kind of nastiness. I haven’t got it to work yet, mind you — it doesn’t see the device. Rest assured that I’m working on that…

I love my iPod, it is an amazing piece of technology that really seems to make your life better. Those of you scoffing now obviously don’t have one, trust me, when you get one you will agree.

The only thing I haven’t been happy with the is its battery life. After six months I now lose a quarter of a full charge if I don’t have it plugged in for a day and I’m only getting about four hours of play time at 60% volume, so I called Apple support today. After the normal half hour of going round in circles I was told two things.

1. Don’t recharge using your cradle. There isn’t enough power from the USB card to fully charge the battery. Always charge the pod using a wall socket.

2. Update and reformat the pod. I assume this works in a similar fashion to a defrag. In the fifty minutes since I’ve done this I’ve transferred 2600 songs back on the unit. Thank god for USB2.

I’ll give it a week or so and if it hasn’t worked I’ll be sending it off for a battery replacement, which is actually a pot luck iPod replacement, but I want my iPod to last more than a hundred shuffles.