The I-Pod Thread

[K.B.]

Well someone had to do it...


Those of you who are lucky enough to have been given one for Christmas: perhaps you can answer a few naggings queries for me.

It seems to be really handy to have thousands of songs on a little hard disk you can carry around. But just how do you get them in there? And how do you label them without spending many precious hours of your life doing so?

What about hard drive failure? Should you backup?

Anyone got one of those photo I-Pods? What are they like?

And what about alternative MP3 players? There must be good rivals.


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[spkguitar]

Karel, I got Vivian one for her birthday last year.

To answer some of your questions:
"But just how do you get them in there?" iTunes; free and easy.

"And how do you label them without spending many precious hours of your life doing so?" I use a program called Easy CD-DA Extractor to 'rip' CDs sometimes, which when properly set does a great job of auto-labeling everything as it rips. Though, sometimes I just use iTunes.

"Should you backup?" You're a protools user and you ask this question? Always backup. I don't actually backup the iPod, though. I backup what goes in it. (Hmmm. Maybe when Vivian gets home from her Christmas holiday with her mom, I'll try a direct backup of the unit.)

I can tell you, I'm thinking about buying another one for myself.

[x9blade]

I have mixed feelings with Ipod, I'm starting to like it more and more and it has many cool features but, i think it could have been more functional. You need to be next to the computer in order to do things with it and it should have had a graphic EQ along with the presets that it has. Some sort of connection to be able to link with another pod to transfer songs would have been nice i think i could go on more but i will stop. i actually like the thing. i was able to get my 40 gig at a great price( friend is the manager at the music store i go to ) Is it worth 400 dollars? hmmmmmmmmmm

[Chris Cavell]

Karel,

I don't own an i-pod, but I imagine it's fairly simple. Nearly all programs that can "rip" a cd have the ability to access the CDDB (cd database) to retrieve all pertinent info on most albums and put the info into the id3 tags. All the online one-song-at-a-time retailers should have the id3 tags completed already. I imagine it is then just a matter of copying to the i-pod using usb or firewire. (but, you'd still have to manually name anything that isn't registered with the cddb though)