By way of background, I’m not an apple guy. I find the “don’t worry, we’ll control everything for you” mindset just as irritating when executed with impeccable style (Apple) as when with fumbling, crashing ineptitude (Microsoft). Nonetheless, when my beloved Rio Karma died, seeing that Rio was going down in flames, I was ecstatic when my mother-in-law gave me a sexy new 4GB Nano! So flipping sexy! I love it!!
Well, I love the form factor. But I do not enjoy being exposed to the Relinquish All Control world of Steve Jobs. Here are some things that suck about the iTunes universe:
It’s really big of Apple to support mp3. Sorta. They’ll play them but they don’t make it easy. There’s a handy Convert to AAC menu option; where’s its MP3 partner? I guess the punishment for interoperability is that you must burn to wav on a CD, then reencode as MP3. Good god.
I decided to buy some music from the iTunes store. What a suck: AAC only, crappy bitrate (128Kbps), you can download precisely once. Wait can’t I buy the CD for about the same price and then do what I want with it? Ain’t DRM grand?
Ok, I accept that I’m not paying for quality or portability with the iTunes store. I’m paying for convenience. So I figure I’ll keep my main library as MP3’s and keep the occasional convenience purchase as Jobs-mandated AAC. Luckily, there’s a Consolidate Libary menu option. Everything from Apple is easy to use. Right?
Hee hee. It grinds away for a while then says “Unable to copy, filename too long,” or some such rot. Of course, it doesn’t tell me which filename was too long, or give me an option to rename it, or give me an option to change the naming policy. So did it consolidate 1% or 99% of my mp3s? I don’t know! Isn’t this sort of thing in UI 101? I remember on my first couple Macs in the 80s, I’d get the “bomb” icon with only one button to push. They must have brought this UI designer back to help the iTunes experience!
Where’s my Rio Karma? Where’s Steve Jobs’ karma?