Paging Guig

Well mate you seem to be well up on these ipods so i was just sorting mine
out as its finally arrived today.
#
Unfortunately i dont have a mac and hence cant use iTunes but have to use
the Musicmatch software and ive fallen at the first hurdle and wondered if i
can ask you summat?

HTF do i convert my wmf files to a type the ipod will accept, i.e. mp3 or
wav??

 

Apple launched iTunes for Windows last week. And very good it is, too.
Very odd using something that looks like OSX on WinXP.....

Windows Media Player, ISTR, will export as MP3.

 

Yes you can:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

 

Incidentally it's a lovely package and I've used it to organise and
catalogue all my MP3's, with the automatic file rename create directory
structure thingy... The random play actually random plays too.

 

:
SNIP

Fucking excellent!! Gonna let the computer spend the night downloading all
19.1MB now via pikeyband!

 

That sounds good.

Mmm - eta 7 mins. Although as you've got the iPod I think you have the
last laugh. One of the fellas at work got the 20gb version on Monday.
I'm sorely tempted, but I don't think I can justify it while I've got my
cd(-r(w)) mp3/wma player.

 

iTunes is out for windows as well now, go to the Apple site. Uninstall that
Musicmatch pish as soon as, but IIRC it leaves a piece of software lying
around which can cause problems with the iPod being recognised/ejected.

There are pieces of software which can convert between the different
formats, but I just re-ripped. Did it at a lower quality as well and now
have over 2000 songs on a 10gb iPod.

--
Guig
GSF600SY Bandit - It's blue you know.
CBFA #1

Oh for the wings of any bird, other than a battery hen.

 

The GUI is pretty slow though, but not bad enough to outweigh the benefit of
having a ripper/syncher/library in one tool. Pity I can't buy from their
iTunes store.

--
Guig
GSF600SY Bandit - It's blue you know.
CBFA #1

Oh for the wings of any bird, other than a battery hen.

 

Well, I had a Sony minidisc with a hi-fi sized minidisc player to create the
discs and I canned it and got the iPod. Best move I made, dumped half my
collection onto the thing, set it to Shuffle Songs and it goes everywhere
with me. Great wee thing, the only thing I'd ever buy from Apple.

--
Guig
GSF600SY Bandit - It's blue you know.
CBFA #1

Oh for the wings of any bird, other than a battery hen.

 

The GUI is, unfortunately, crippled by the Wintel hardware / OS.

It flies along just fine on even a clunky iBook like mine.

 

Funny. itunes under windows is a shambles.

Would I like to add an icon to the desktop? "No thanks". Tough, you're
getting one anyway.

Would I like itunes to be the default player for all music types? "Hmmm, no
thanks". itunes has been set to play all music.

Would you like to register an itunes account? "Sure, why not, lets get it
all set up". Actually you live in England so we don't wan't to sell you any
music.

Would you like to enable CD burning features? "Why not, I have Windows XP
which can burn CDs, Nero and some other program, but if I can burn it
staight from download to CD that will be cool". Error, no CD burning
software detected.

The maximize button actually minimizes it.

You can only scale it from the bottom right.

The scrolling speed of the window contents is dire. I can throw a million 3D
polygons around at 100fps yet Apple can't code a flat image to scroll at
more than 1fps?

All the music comes in a very average 128k aac format. Where are the
192k/VBR mp3/wma/ogg files? 'indistinguishable from CD quality' my arse.

After installing and uninstalling, it wants to restart my computer. Why?

After installing it the cheeky buggers pissed about with my quicktime
settings so it reactivates the QT taskbar icon, fires up QT when I start and
shows their hot picks adverts.

On top of this, the fucker has gone and reorganised and renamed all my
fecking files. Utter, utter cunting fucking fuckers.

This is worse than a a bloated winamp 3 beta.

I'm sure there will be a mac zealot along in a minute to tell me I'm clearly
wrong and that all of the above is actually good for me.

 

Pretty usual PC software behaviour, IME.

Didn't do that here. Still set to play in Winamp by default.

Not Apple's fault, that one. Something to do with licensing / copyright
in the EU.

Worked fine for me.

Haven't noticed this one.

That's Mac behaviour.

I'm sure they could have made it faster - never thought it to be a
problem myself.

This the iTunes Shop downloads you're talking about now?

Because it's Windows, that's why.

Didn't do that here.

That's because you imported the files, most likely.

However, I don't really worry about stuff like that as it means I have a
uniform library of stuff over all my machines (iTunes for Windows has
made it easier to share the stuff over the network of several other
machines using iTunes)

I think you're being overly critical of what is a first release for
Windows. It's much better than the shite MS have been flogging to Mac
users for the past 10 years......

 

Would I like to add an icon to the desktop? "No thanks". Tough, you're

If they give me an option then they've always done what I've told 'em to do

After I got shot of it, everything complained it couldn't find itunes, would
I like to pick another app to play the file instead.

You can come fix mine then.

But this isn't a mac.

But it doesn't need to, its just a badly made installer.

It asked me where my music files were and where I would like new music to
go, which I duely pointed it to. I don't remember telling it to go pissing
around with 3000 files, renaming stuff how it sees fit.

I saw that bit, but didn't try it, not after how much it feckered up the
simple bits.

Yeah, but mac users aren't real people. Like coppers and corner store
owners.

 

Steve, you really do have your mac-blinkers on on this one. There are
many programs that don't install things when you ask them not to. Even
RealPlayer (spit) doesn't do thigns if you tell it not to.

It's done it here. Was winamp, is now iTunes. Perhaps you ran winamp
which took back it's associations?

Yes, it does.

The three above makes me think it's not the "Wintel" hardware and os,
more like Apple can't code windows programs. There's plenty programs
out there with a responsive interface.

It also faffed with my quicktime settings, but I've not got any adverts
yet. Although that might be down to me denying all net access until I
actually ask it to go on the net.

 

It does appeal to me for the fact that I can easily got my collection
onto it, free up a lot of space on the computer and always have music
with me.

Can you charge them from the mains/adapters yet, or is it still plug it
in to charge?

 

already "Considered Harmful".

 

how the **** is the GUI crippled by the hardware?

Oh, why am I even bothering...

 

It comes with a firewire cable and a mains adaptor. You can't play from it
while plugged into a PC, but if charging off the adaptor you can also play
it. I got an extra firewire cable and have the charger in the bedroom where
it gets connected up to a pair of speakers, set the timer to 60 minutes or
so and go to sleep with the music playing away.

Does any of that make sense?

--
Guig
GSF600SY Bandit - It's blue you know.
CBFA #1

Oh for the wings of any bird, other than a battery hen.

 

I'm interested in the answer. For very small values of interested[1].

[1] Not seen that witty phrase for a while.

 

OK, I'm no expert on this, but I belive that Windows is a bodge of a GUI
running on a basic architecture that wasn't designed with a GUI in mind.
Whereas Mac hardware was always designed to run a GUI, so the hardware
takes care of a lot of the stuff that has to be coded for in a Windows
application.

Of course, this could all be bollocks - but this is my understanding of
why the Mac GUI seems to fly along on relatively underpowered hardware -
my 1GHZ PC running XP feels really clunky and slow compared with my old
and slow 366MHZ iBook.