Why I hate my iPod

The iPod, while certainly a marvelous piece of technology, instills in me a certain dread every time I use it. Is it the propensity for the click wheel to stop responding for days on end? No. Is it that the battery always seems to be almost dead every time I use it after letting it sit for a few days? No.

What I hate is this: While being amazingly easy to use, the damn thing is just so frickin' frustrating to use! Here's why.

I hate playlists. I have 20 GB of music on my iPod. I have a wife and two kids. Every time I go out in the car, I'm not going to sit down at the computer and make a playlist of what I think everyone will like to listen to. When listening to music at my desk, I use a nice media player called J. River Media Center, which has a "Now Playing" list. I can pick any song, hit play, and that song will be in the Now Playing list, all by itself. I can pick an album, an artist, a genre, or a playlist, hit play, and that's what goes into the Now Playing list. I can shuffle that list. And I can add to it, just by picking another song and choosing "Add to Now Playing".

That functionality, which lets me decide on the fly what I want to listen to, is completely missing from both iTunes and the iPod. All right, who said "On The Go" playlist? iPod's On The Go playlist is completely different, and completely useless to me. Why? Three reasons:

1) It's a pain in the arse to have to keep remembering to clear the playlist every time.

2) It's too easy to disrupt it. Never mind the fact that I have to go into the playlists menu to start it playing in the first place after picking some songs, if, while the playlist is playing, and I'm browsing through my music adding more songs to it, I happen to click quickly on a song instead of click-and-holding on the song (very easy to do, I do it almost every time even though I'm aware of the issue), all of a sudden I'm playing that song instead of my playlist. Back out to the playlist menu, into the playlist, find where I was, start it playing there again...

3) I can't shuffle it. Apple kindly added a "Shuffle" command to the root menu of the iPod. Oops, it shuffles and plays all 3000 of my songs. Nice - now my kids get to listen to my death-metal interspersed with Barney classics. Friggin' useless.

/end rant.

8/25/2006 : permalink
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