By: WhatDoesItSay
24 Mar 2003, 01:51 PM EST Msg. 1117372 of 1117376
More problems for the iPod...
iPod problems send PC users in search of Zen solution
By Charles Wright
March 25 2003
theage.comau
When things first started going wrong with our friend Tim's iPod, he took it back to the dealer. It's a Windows version, which uses MusicMatch Jukebox Plus rather than the Mac's beautifully integrated iMusic software. Windows, it turned out, was part of the problem.
The dealer would have liked to help our friend, he explained, 'but we don't have anyone here who knows anything about Windows'.
Tim went to Apple tech support. They told him roughly the same thing.
As you might imagine, this was a discouraging response for someone who'd just spent $590 (a student discount on the reduced $650 sale price) on the 5GB iPod, and another $140 on a FireWire card for his laptop.
The problems had begun almost immediately. When he plugged the iPod into the FireWire card, Jukebox Plus started getting haughty. Sometimes it recognised the iPod was there, sometimes it didn't. When it did, it would agree to download about 3 per cent of the music, then suddenly freeze.
Our friend isn't easily discouraged. He mucked around and finally persuaded the iPod to download one track, selected randomly from the albums being transferred. He spent an hour one night going through that process and ended up with about 100 songs on the iPod.
His hopes were rudely dashed, however, when he discovered that many of the tracks skipped. That's when he went to the dealer, and Apple, and discovered that Apple apparently had no means to support a product it was selling.
So he brought the iPod to us. As the song goes, that's what friends are for.
When we examined his expensive new toy, it looked like it had no tracks on it. It refused to sync with any of our computers. It seemed that the internal database had become confused, perhaps because the batteries had gone flat while syncing. In any case, the iPod was essentially useless.
We used the update tool that ships with the iPod to reset the factory defaults. That made things worse. Now we'd lost the iPod menu. All we could see was a folder. We had to run the update program several times, and then reformat the hard disk.
We transferred a good deal of Tim's music, most of it without skips. Unfortunately, it wasn't the end of Tim's problems. Within days, he was having the same problems.
We think we've tracked down the likely cause - almost certainly the combination of Tim's laptop and either his FireWire card or cable.
We're about to make another attempt to resolve the issues, using the tips we discovered at www.ephpod.com/troubleshoot.html.
EphPod is an interesting product. It speeds up PC-iPod transfers, and interfaces with Outlook contacts and WinAmp playlists. It requires a copy of MacOpener, which allows Windows to read Mac files.
Another useful resource in our hunt for a solution is the information at garote.bdmonkeys.net/ipod-experience/
As that site points out, it appears that the FireWire port built into Creative Labs' Audigy soundcards works very well with the iPod. Although that's not going to work with a laptop, it may be that Tim needs to use his desktop for his iPod syncing.
The irony is that Creative Labs' Zen MP3 player is a strong competitor to the iPod on the PC. We reviewed it a few months ago and, although we were tempted by it, we ran into a few irritations. A couple of weeks ago, we looked at the new 20GB version. Initially Creative decided against including a USB 2 interface with this unit, but they've changed their mind. That means you can have high-speed transfers without buying a FireWire card - provided your motherboard or an external card supports USB 2.
The iPod has fewer buttons than the Zen - this makes accessing some functions take that little bit longer. Also we found we could do more with the Zen without looking than we could on the iPod.
When we last looked at it, we found ourselves accidentally pressing the Zen's controls, because of the layout of the buttons. The 20GB model comes with a pouch/belt clip that solves all those problems. Simply being able to grip the pouch and not the Zen puts those buttons out of reach.
The Zen has a separate power input, while the iPod uses the FireWire connection. If you are syncing your iPod with a notebook, you have to make sure it's fully charged because it will not run off the notebook's power supply.
The Zen also has a great feature called EAX. In addition to some great reverb and echo effects, it allows you to control the speed of your music. You can slow it down to 50 per cent or speed it up to 150 per cent.
When it comes to software, both leave something to be desired.
Even with all its bugs worked out - and we're sure they can be - the iPod is much better with a Mac than a PC. And because Apple and its dealers don't seem to be enough aware of the problems to warn customers of possible difficulties with hardware, let alone point them to reliable FireWire solutions, we can't recommend the iPod for Windows users, although the Mac version, particularly with its links to iCal and iSync, remains peerless as an MP3 player. If you have a PC, the new 20GB Creative Zen with USB 2 is our choice.
