Ipod and Itunes: really essential and intuitive features.

No doubt that I cannot live without my ipod. It is one of the best designed products of our times… but there are certain essential and intuitive features both in ipod and itunes, which apple needs to fix/add…

I am just going to list them as they come to my mind …..well if you got any more..i would encourage you to leave your comment on this and I would add it to the list with due acknowledgment to you. I think there are a lot more…

1. This is by far the biggest one! … why can’t I manage photos on my ipod manually..?? Why do i always need to sync it with a main copy? I should be able to drag and drop photos into different albums just like I add songs do different playlists!

2. Why is it so difficult for itunes to let me manage my songs in terms of folders and sub folders? That way I can be more organized. I used to have a chinese look alike ipod which would let me just drag and drop the folders using windows explorer and it would let me recurse thru these folders.

3. Why can’t I add songs to the ‘on the go’ playlist from the cover flow? ( I suggest this feature on the apple website)

4. <please comment if you have anything in mind…i’ll add it here….ofcourse with your name after it

Siddharth Khimsara

my new ipod classic 160gb and one of the major irritations (bugs) of itunes!

i got a new ipod 160gb classic yesterday…and since yesterday I am trying to fill it up…but its way too much space …but i know will fill it soon….. awesome UI…and the cover flow is just crazy. and they have even fixed the problem of fast battery drain because of cover flow, in the 1.0.2 version of the firmware. I love the user interface on the classic ipod so much better than that on the old 5.5 generation.

anyway..i just thought i should write about one of the major irritations using itunes when it comes to syncing the ipod..and how i solved the problem with some common sense. It will surely help a lot of other people who have faced this problem. However, before I being, I would like to THANK apple for atleast letting the playlists show directly inside the ipod…. i used to have a 30gb and in that there was no way to do this..the only option we had was the smart playlists

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Anyway, this is what happened while i was putting songs into my ipod using itunes. if you have look at the screenshot, you can see that for >= 8gb ipods, we can create playlists inside the device itself (i.e ipod). Now if accidentally I delete one of these playlists, and dont remember which one it is, since I have like around 50 playlists, the songs that the playlist remain in the ipod. but the playlist is lost….and in the 6000 songs on my ipod, there is no way I can locate them..and put them back in a new playlist with the same name! This is exactly happened with me and you can guess how irritating it is…for a moment i was like..forget it..i have a 160gb..what the heck… but I still wanted to solve this problem..and i suddenly thought of applying reverse logic……….if I cannot find the one that is lost, let me just mark the ones that I do have ….and then i thought of using the rating option in itunes..

….this is what I did… i marked all the songs in all the playlists which were intact to 5 stars… ( just Ctrl-A –> (right click) –> rating –> ***** and I did for all the playlists… I then went to the music playlist which shows all the songs in the ipod currently…and sorted the songs according to the rating. I found around 300 songs which did not have a 5* rating… these were the ones that were there in the playlist that i had accidentally deleted….. whew! i immediately created a playlist for it and copied them there. .so revers logic helps a lot sometimes … …btw now you better CtrlA again and remove all the ratings….. (this idea will work only for the ones who don’t really use this ratings feature.) personally I use the play count to know my own rating..its again more intuitive

now i am not sure why itunes doesn’t warn you before you delete any playlist or why there is no undo for something like this… or maybe there must be some setting for it…but i couldn’t locate it!!

i personally feel that though itunes is a great software, it need a lot of intuitive improvements..

Siddharth Khimsara