Man, I am hating my new mini iPod

The main reason I went with iPod is because I always figured Apple knew how to do intuitive, simple user interfaces better than anybody else. I can't figure out how to do anything. It's like there's some assumed level of knowledge they expect everyone to have but nobody let me in on the secret. Maybe you're supposed to be a Mac user or something, but as a PC user I don't have a clue what's going on. So I'm making my way slowly and painfully, learning to do little tiny things.

Example: I couldn't even figure out how to navigate the little menu on the thing. I kept clicking the wheel, expecting to go down or up or something. Turns out it's some kind of touch-sensitive doohicky. If I had known that at the start it would have saved me some frustration. I still haven't quite figured out how it works but at least I'm clicking a lot less.

I had the way I wanted to organize my music all planned out but I don't think I'm going to be able to do it after all. Maybe I will return it and go with that Dell thing after all.

to the first idiot *no offense, Ratty* that walks up to it. What would happen if there was a severe stomach bug at one of our nation's air traffic control towers, and after the controllers all shit themselves to death, us commoners weren't able to get in the elevator and immediately assume command of the nearby air traffic? Have you actually considered that?

/maximum sarcasm with a splash of non-RTFMing directed venom

http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/tutorial/

:hi: :hug:

Is the way it ignores the filenames of your mp3s and just uses
the ID3 metatags inside the files.

When I got my iPod, I had 3000+ mp3s all stored according to
filename.

It took WEEKS of faffing around with iTunes and multiple tools
off the web to arrange the ID3 tags into some sane order
that allowed me to find my music when it was uploaded to the
unit :(

My collection is about 90% classical music, 10% country western. I want to organize things at the top level by composer, put the CW into a generic "Pop" catgory. Okay, easy enough. I figure I have to make me one of those "playlist" things (I think another problem in so far as "assumed knowledge" goes is the whole mp3 culture which I've never been a part of. Never downloaded music in my life. CDs are the farthest I've gotten in music technology. I'm guessing concepts like "playlists" are second nature to the Napster generation). But I really need a second level of hierarchy below composer. Say I want Chopin at the top level, but then I want to group all of his etudes together into a separate etude folder. And so much of my stuff has multiple movements. You want to keep all of the movements of a sonata together, and in order. As far as I have found on any of Apple's tutorial pages, there's nothing about hierarchy, not even whether you can do it or not. I just don't want to have about million playlists at the top level I have to wade through. The iTunes program has options to create new folders which seemed promising, but after playing with that I have no idea what it's supposed to do.

you want, just shift-click, or command-click the songs to select them and drag them where you want.:hi: :hug:

then i'll send it back. promise. really. scouts honor.

I guess you hve to have a teenager around. Oh God, no!

It's EXTREMELY, WAY OVER-THE-EDGE , BEYOND ALL REASON touch-sensitive.

There's a difference.

I figure it must be something you have to get used to, if I were going to keep it that is.

my kid just bought a shuffle it took us weeks to understand how to download songs.Even when you know what you're doing you don't know what you're doing.

If I can't figure out some kind of hierarchy then, seriously, it's worthless to me. If I have 10 Mozart Concertos, each with three movements, how am I supposed to organize those? Do I have one playlist called "Mozart Concertos" with all 30 movements smashed in there together? If I want to listen to the C Major Concerto do I scroll down the long list of movements until I get to it? And I have to have a similar playlist for Beethoven Concertos, and Beethoven Sonatas, ad nauseum? I don't think anybody at Apple even thought about classical music for one single second during the years of development time. Their idea of classical music was probably easy listening Vivendi tunes, or just the best bits of the Tschaikowsky piano concerto.

When I heard about the iPod's "hierarchical menu" system I thought that was exactly what I wanted, but it's not very hierarchical at all, at least as far as I have been able to research. I hate returning stuff so I'm going to try and investigate some more. I see other portable players *Do* have true hierarchical menus.

Plus, you know, I'm really not all that impressed with the sound quality. What a huge disappointment so far.

You really need to upgrade the earphones to get the the best sound quality.

You might wanna check www.ipodlounge.com for tips. The forum is a great source of tips!! It helped me ALOT.

I checked it out and it looks useful. I did a web search for 'ipod worthless "classical music"' and found a thing or two. If only I'd tried that BEFORE I ordered this piece of crap.

http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050322/BUSINESS/50322015/1081/news02">Era of iPod leaves classical-music fans in a lurch

I definitely disagree with the author when he says there's hardly any classical music to download. One of the selling points of the iPod for me was when I found every single obscure classical title I searched for at their iTunes store. But the rest of the article is right on. He mentions shameful tactics users have to resort to (and users having to "resort" to anything is not something I typically associate with Apple computer, so sad) to store their classical music--weird cryptic shorthand, forgoing the artist completely. "Joining tracks" (Aha!) but sacrificing the ability to skip to a particular movement.

I'll play around with joining tracks to see if I can live with that, but I think I'm boxing this worthless piece of shit up this weekend and carting it to the post office come Monday. (Heh, sorry about that ret5hd)

I did some reading and the biggest complaint seems to be with the bass, and that's just the problem I'm hearing.

pretty good sound quality for 99 bucks.It sounds like you have a muched more refined ear than mine though,I just listen to rock.

I think you want to set up 10 playlists - one for each concerto, and
add the appropriate 3 movements into each playlist?

Or else make 10 albums and set the album-name of the 3 movements
to the same album name.

Either one should accomplish the same thing.

In my experience most mp3 players are awkward in this regard. The
iPod has many problems but I don't think your particular problem
would be resolved by getting a different player.

I read someplace else about people using the Album and Genre categories to kind of do a poor man's hierarchy. That just might work. I'll have to try that.

There do seem to be mp3 players out there now that support hierarchical playlists of the kind I need, but who knows what their quality or reliability is like. Adding that kind of hierarchy definitely does have implications for ease of use. But if anyone could have figured that out, it should have been Apple.

I got my hierarchy! Yay! I just had to use the existing hierarchy the iPod gives you. It's not ideal by a longshot but I've been using it and it is solidly adequate. I used the Artist field to list the composer and then the Album field to list the specific work plus the performer's name.

As you know, I've discovered the iPod (and presumably most MP3 players) doesn't really fit well with classical music. Classical music differs from popular music in two important ways:

1. Most works are comprised of several different pieces: Symphonies, concertos, sonatas all typically contain 3 or 4 individual movements. Suites have even more. Some works, such as collections of Etudes, Preludes, or Waltzes, have many many more.
2. Both the composer and the performer are vitally important aspects in classical music.

Playlists don't work at all for this since they are completely flat. Although they give you the ability to group the individual parts of a symphony together they still have two major problems:

1. You are forced to use an extremely brief nomenclature to cram all of the information you need to find a piece of classical music. E.g., to list Shostakovich's 10 Preludes and Fugues, Op 87, as performed by Tatiana Nikolaeva you would have to invent a playlist called something like: Shos-Prel(87)/Nik. Ugh.
2. Since you would be using playlists for individual works to keep their parts together, rather than using playlists for large groups of works, you end up with many, many more playlists, hundreds and hundreds, than you typically have with popular music. This makes finding a playlist extremely unwieldy and difficult to use, particularly if you're forced to name them as above

What using Artist and Album does for you is that you can remove at least some of the information you'd normally cram into a playlist title. If I assign the Artist as "Shostakovich" then I can take the "Shos-" out of the horrible title above. You still have to cram a lot into the Album name--Preludes(87)/Niko--but my example was a bit extreme to illustrate the point. I would normally be satisfied with putting all of the preludes together, not just the Opus 87 ones, so I could eliminate the (87) from above. And it turns out for almost all of my classical music the brief nomenclature I use is not too horrible at all, once I'm able to remove the composer's name from the Album title (Luckily a lot of classical music has very brief titles like "Waltz," "Prelude," "Fugue," etc.)

• Brahms
  • Ballades / Wild
    • Op 10, No 1
    • Op 10, No 2
    • Op 10, No 3
    • Op 10, No 4
      
  • Rhapsodies / Pogo
    • Op 79, No 1
    • Op 79, No 2

It took me a lot of experimenting and restarting from scratch and then testing to see whether I liked the result or not and I really can live with it. Most of my music happens to fall into short, easy to understand nomenclature such as the above. There are few ugly exceptions but I can live with a few just fine. I imagine some classical music afficionados would have a much harder time due to the kinds of things that are important to them, but for my needs I have something that seems to work quite well. And all it took was being able to remove the composer name from my titles which left me space enough to use a clearer, less ugly nomenclature.

Yeah, most of you could care less I imagine, but seeing as how many people embrace things like the iPod with a maniacal, religious fervor (and I'm not criticizing, I think it's great), I knew my subject line was bound to raise a few hackles, heh ;) , but I was feeling naughty yesterday. So I thought I should check back in and say I no longer HATE my iPod. I think I will keep it. 18 hours of battery life is pretty remarkable. And after all I've been uploading into it I've only used up a little over half a Gb! I have way more space than I think I'll ever use. I think I've gotten used to the way oversensitive touch wheel, though I still can't manage to work it one-handed. And I think I'll invest in some better earphones because really, the bass does suck quite badly.

in 30 minutes, I never new it was this difficult. Better get my self one while he still lives at home.