The iPod on Windows
Jul. 12th, 2003 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinSam got me a 10-gigabyte iPod for my birthday, and told me that she was using me as a guinea pig, since she thought she might like one herself. So I got her the 15-gig model (which comes with the dock and remote) as an anniversary present. I was interested to see how the experience of using the thing on her Windows PC would differ from mine on the Macintosh.
The third-generation iPods, wisely, aren't sold in separate Windows and Mac versions; they all come packaged with Mac and Windows software, and they're formatted by default for Mac HFS but the software will reformat them for Windows if necessary.
Getting started on my Mac was simple: all I had to do was plug the thing into a FireWire port, and it started charging through the port and downloading songs from my iTunes library. I did have an odd problem with the installer for the otherwise excellent 2.0.1 iPod software update -- the installer hung in a bizarre manner that required a hard reboot of the Mac (the whole computer wasn't hung, but the process became unkillable even by
The PC installation experience was different, and somewhat worse. This can't be chalked up entirely to the suckiness of Windows; it's more Apple's fault for providing fairly minimalist instructions for what is necessarily a more complex installation procedure, due to the system not being built around the possibility of iPods in the first place.
Sam didn't have FireWire or USB 2.0, so I got her a FireWire card, with six-pin ports so the iPod could charge off of it. Nevertheless, for some reason, the Windows instructions have you charge the iPod off the power adapter the first time around-- maybe just to be safe, maybe because there's some chicken-and-egg issue to worry about. One thing I did wonder about was the USB 2.0 case-- support for high-speed USB 2.0 only comes with the iPod 2.0.1 software update, so, again, there's a chicken-and-egg problem-- how do you get it initialized and load the update? Maybe it can get the ball rolling through low-speed USB, though that sounds pretty painful. In any event, when we plugged the iPod Dock into the power adapter, the iPod seemed hung on the Apple logo boot screen and required resetting. That's easy enough, but Sam's first assumption was that it was broken, and I'm sure many others would assume this too. (I suppose this isn't specifically a PC problem, but it was odd.)
For Windows, the iPod comes with MusicMatch Jukebox software, a music player that is not as slick as iTunes but seems serviceable. (Some seem to prefer the open-source program ephPod to MusicMatch, but Sam hasn't tried it.)
The instructions that come with the iPod don't deal with the possibility that you already have MusicMatch installed. Sam already had it installed on her PC, with some music ripped to it, and in fact it was a newer version than the one that was on the CD, so she guessed that she wouldn't need to do anything with the CD. But there's also some plug-in on there that auto-detects the presence of the iPod and starts it syncing when you plug it in; and Sam finally figured out that since that hadn't been installed, the iPod would not sync until Sam ran another installer, which had the usual flakiness of software installers. In the process she ended up getting the 2.0.1 update as well, and if I recall correctly she had to run that installer a couple of times before it worked.
In any event, she was ready to fling the thing against the wall a couple of times (I was also annoying her with my curiosity to find out how it would work), but once she finally got it working it was, as usually reported, a joy to use. She listens to the thing all the time now, maybe more than I do-- even uses it to listen to Doctor Who audio dramas while she's drifting off to sleep (she says this reminds her of reading in bed with a flashlight in her youth). One application I hadn't thought of: there are CPU-intensive programs she uses on her Dell, particularly for work, that can't coexist happily with a running music player, but she now has a working jukebox even then in the form of the iPod.
Apple really needs to work on that instruction manual, though, and on their software installers as well.
The third-generation iPods, wisely, aren't sold in separate Windows and Mac versions; they all come packaged with Mac and Windows software, and they're formatted by default for Mac HFS but the software will reformat them for Windows if necessary.
Getting started on my Mac was simple: all I had to do was plug the thing into a FireWire port, and it started charging through the port and downloading songs from my iTunes library. I did have an odd problem with the installer for the otherwise excellent 2.0.1 iPod software update -- the installer hung in a bizarre manner that required a hard reboot of the Mac (the whole computer wasn't hung, but the process became unkillable even by
kill -9 from the shell even when permissions were such that this should have been possible), though the iPod itself was fine. Other than that, no worries. I didn't have to install anything off the enclosed CD.The PC installation experience was different, and somewhat worse. This can't be chalked up entirely to the suckiness of Windows; it's more Apple's fault for providing fairly minimalist instructions for what is necessarily a more complex installation procedure, due to the system not being built around the possibility of iPods in the first place.
Sam didn't have FireWire or USB 2.0, so I got her a FireWire card, with six-pin ports so the iPod could charge off of it. Nevertheless, for some reason, the Windows instructions have you charge the iPod off the power adapter the first time around-- maybe just to be safe, maybe because there's some chicken-and-egg issue to worry about. One thing I did wonder about was the USB 2.0 case-- support for high-speed USB 2.0 only comes with the iPod 2.0.1 software update, so, again, there's a chicken-and-egg problem-- how do you get it initialized and load the update? Maybe it can get the ball rolling through low-speed USB, though that sounds pretty painful. In any event, when we plugged the iPod Dock into the power adapter, the iPod seemed hung on the Apple logo boot screen and required resetting. That's easy enough, but Sam's first assumption was that it was broken, and I'm sure many others would assume this too. (I suppose this isn't specifically a PC problem, but it was odd.)
For Windows, the iPod comes with MusicMatch Jukebox software, a music player that is not as slick as iTunes but seems serviceable. (Some seem to prefer the open-source program ephPod to MusicMatch, but Sam hasn't tried it.)
The instructions that come with the iPod don't deal with the possibility that you already have MusicMatch installed. Sam already had it installed on her PC, with some music ripped to it, and in fact it was a newer version than the one that was on the CD, so she guessed that she wouldn't need to do anything with the CD. But there's also some plug-in on there that auto-detects the presence of the iPod and starts it syncing when you plug it in; and Sam finally figured out that since that hadn't been installed, the iPod would not sync until Sam ran another installer, which had the usual flakiness of software installers. In the process she ended up getting the 2.0.1 update as well, and if I recall correctly she had to run that installer a couple of times before it worked.
In any event, she was ready to fling the thing against the wall a couple of times (I was also annoying her with my curiosity to find out how it would work), but once she finally got it working it was, as usually reported, a joy to use. She listens to the thing all the time now, maybe more than I do-- even uses it to listen to Doctor Who audio dramas while she's drifting off to sleep (she says this reminds her of reading in bed with a flashlight in her youth). One application I hadn't thought of: there are CPU-intensive programs she uses on her Dell, particularly for work, that can't coexist happily with a running music player, but she now has a working jukebox even then in the form of the iPod.
Apple really needs to work on that instruction manual, though, and on their software installers as well.