So the iPod Classic, I’ve had it a few weeks now and I can tell you; it’s far from “Classic”. Unless classic means a massive step backwards. Basically it’s riddled with bugs, so far I have found:

• Menu randomly resets to the system defaults, hmmm annoying as the defaults suck.
• Doesn’t sync playcounts back to iTunes, meaning I can’t submit what I’ve listened to, to last.fm. If it does sync, it gets it horribly wrong and thinks I’ve listened to one song 47 times or some similar crazyness.
• Can’t hide compilation artists from the main Artists list or the cover flow, a clear 100% regression from the previous generation of iPods, which all had this feature. God only knows why Apple removed this incredibly useful feature.
• Horrible screen saver that kicks in after a minute, which means you can’t take your iPod of your pocket to see what you listening too, without pressing a button (not good when driving)
• Cover flow sorts by artist not album, yeah that makes sense… at least give me the option.
• The menus are sluggish, and performance isn’t great moving around the user interface.

So all in all it’s a bit of stinker, I’m not the only one that’s unhappy, the Apple and iLounge forums are awash with complaints and bug reports (I’ve not even suffered the random crashes that many have had).

There is nothing here that couldn’t be fixed in a firmware update, Apple have released one already (1.0.0 -> 1.0.1) which was rushed out to fix the random crashes, I’m really hoping for another update and soon.

If I had know all of this before I impulsively bought the thing, it would have been a different matter. At least it looks nice…

iTunes 7, not sure why I upgraded, nothing that exciting apart from the album art fetching feature.
Now I really wish I hadn’t – it crashed on me and I lost my entire library, got that back from a backup (once bitten, twice shy). Now it starts up, spends about 1 hour doing the gapless playback analysis bollocks again then crashes in a heap when I shut it down, meaning it goes through gapless shite again on next start and so on, ad infinitum. Don’t bother with version 7, at least 6 worked.

Update – luckily I backed up my iTunes library files prior to the upgrade; I’ve uninstalled 7 put 6.0.4 back on and copied over my backed up DB. It’s all working like a charm.

iTunes 7 is out and it supports gapless playback. The bad news is this only works on 5th generation iPods (see this Apple support article). Boooo, the chances of this being rolled out to older iPods, somewhere around zero I’d guess.

I never found an elegant solution for getting last.fm submissions from the iPod, but jscrob2 seems perfect. It’s a plugin for iTunes that submits anything you listen to in iTunes but also submits anything you played on the iPod when you sync it up.

Click here for the jscrob2 website

Update [14th June] – the above link is dead, but I found another site with the plugin download

So yet again iTunes starts up and complains – The file “iTunes Library.itl” does not appear to be a valid music library file. iTunes has attempted to recover your music library and renamed this file to
“iTunes Library (Damaged).itl” blah, blah.

Oh, well I thought, it does this ALL the time, and after 15 mins of disk grinding and thrashing the CPU it rebuilds the library. Ooooohhh no, not this time.

It’s all gone, every sodding MP3 from my library. I think spending all day recreating my library of 5000+ MP3 is a good way to spend my time, and even  after doing all that I’ve still lost all my track ratings and playcounts. thanks Apple for the quality and well tested software that is iTunes.

Why the Apple developers decided it would be a good idea to keep the iTunes library in two places – a binary file (.itl) and a xml file, is beyond me. Just one more thing to go wrong and get out of sync if you ask me (but then I’m not the god like genius that the Apple developers are). BTW, I’m not alone in this problem as a Google search throws up thousands of hits for this problem (no solutions or causes though)