I Pod therefore I am

I finally succumbed to fashion and bought an iPod - a 160GB Classic to be precise.

I don't normally listen to music on the move unless I'm driving, and recently the CD player in the car has been playing up (haha!) and either refusing to play a CD at all, or requiring several tries to get it to start. On top of that it's been exhibiting various strange behaviours including skipping tracks, returning to the start of the CD whenever I tried to legitimately skip a track, and starting to fast-forward its way through tracks without any provocation.

So I was intrigued when a couple of my mates opted for a solution based on connecting a small FM radio broadcaster to their iPods and tuning the car radio to that. The prospect of carrying my entire music collection with me rather than the dozen or so CDs that would fit in the glovebox was attractive, as was the ability to also carry every photograph I've ever taken, so I bit the bullet.

The device arrived yesterday, and I spent most of the daylight hours of my birthday getting it set up. The initial installation wasn't a problem - I downloaded iTunes from the Apple website and installed it in a few minutes - but then it set off trawling my hard drive for music files, video files, podcasts and pictures. This took almost half an hour, mainly because it found over a thousand of the small wav files we used to play in the Coronation Street chat room. I'd forgotten I even had these, tucked away in a corner of my PC I no longer visit, but the fact they'd been found meant I then had to select them all for removal from the list so they wouldn't be copied over to the iPod. I'm sure there would have been an option to stop it looking for wav files, but the process kicked itself off before I'd even had chance to look.

The second issue to bite me was that I'd ripped the majority of our music to my PC in WMA format. A few minutes research had convinced me this was a better format than MP3 when space wasn't an issue, so fully 80% of our CDs were represented this way. Naturally, owing to the continuing animosity between Apple and Microsoft, iPods do not play WMA files natively. The files have to be converted to either AAV or MP3. iTunes does help out in this process - it will do the conversion automatically if you attempt to copy WMA files over - but it can't help with the elapsed time penalty you incur.

I started off with the entire set of WMAs selected (about 3,000) and let iTunes off the leash. After a couple of hours I extrapolated its progress, which gave me an estimate of 21 hours to complete the conversion!

I was just bemoaning the rate of conversion to Nikki when my machine blue-screened, thus introducing me to the third issue: iTunes does not maintain any progress records connected with the conversion. When I switched it to the list of WMAs for a second time and let it go, it started again from the beginning, writing duplicate AAV files to my disc with slightly different names from those it had created the first time round. Doh!

I stopped the process as soon as I realised what it was doing, and deleted the duplicates. Rather than try to work out how far it had progressed, I decided the sensible alternative was to decided exactly what music I wanted on the iPod and convert only that to start with. I also decided it might be more realistic to perform the conversions in bite-sized chunks, so I selected 4-5 albums for it to be going on with and also started the synchronisation process off in parallel to copy over the ones that had already been converted.

Once the sync was complete I disconnected the iPod and tripped over the fourth issue of the day. Selecting "Eject iPod" from iTunes is NOT the same as doing a "safely remove hardware." We have a long-standing issue with our NetGear USB wireless dongles, where if you pull out another USB device that would normally behave itself (like a memory stick) then the wireless transceivers lock up. I realised this may have been at the heart of my earlier blue-screen, since the freeze occasionally renders the driver corrupt and crashes the whole machine. From now one I'm going to have to be extremely careful when disconnecting the iPod if I'm to avoid needing to reboot every time!

Eight hours, four problems, and less than half the music collection sync'd over. All in all a surprisingly frustrating experience for such a "leading edge" technology device and subconscious confirmation that I was right to avoid it as long as I did (I assume earlier versions were even worse!).