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February 23, 2004
iPod Mini: Mixed Feelings So Far
My wife is leaving on a 12-day international work trip in 3 weeks and she wanted a convenient way to take her music with her. In the past, she relied on an MP3-capable CD player, burning 30-40 albums on 3-4 CD-Rs -- a cheap and fairly convenient option.
Well, since her CD-MP3 player was stolen during our trip to Hawaii last October, she needs a new solution. I asked her what functionality she'd like and how small it should be. She replied that she wanted it to hold around 30 albums (at least), be small enough to easily jog with, and it didn't need an FM tuner. Doing the math, I figured that one of the new MP3 players with a small 1.5-4 GB hard drive would be perfect.
I investigated the options and came up with three reasonable alternatives: the Rio Nitrus (1.5GB), the Creative Nomad MUVO2 (4GB), and the Apple iPod Mini (4GB). The Nitrus and the MUVO2 are shown above on the left and right respectively.
Reviews generally favored the interface on the iPod Mini, and I figured my wife would prefer the simplest UI. So, off to the Apple store we went, and we came home with a silver iPod Mini for her (shown below to the right compared to my 256MB flash-based MPIO FL100 player on the left).
She followed the setup and installation instructions, which went mostly smoothly. Within about 20 minutes after the initial charge was completed, she was installing songs onto her iPod. iTunes seemed to do the trick, although the interface wasn't nearly as intuitive as I had expected. This was our first Apple product since my beloved IIe back in High School, so I haven't kept up on the state of the Macintosh. I guess I had figured that Apple's software would be as driven by UI and industrial design as their hardware is, but apparently I was expecting too much. iTunes is no better laid out and no more intuitive than Real One or most of the mainstream Windows-based music apps. But, it worked, and she's happy with it, and the interface on the actualy iPod itself is quite excellent.
This morning, my relationship with iTunes took a turn for the worse. I tried to sync my Palm OS device and it hung when it got to WeSync, an app we use to synchronize our calendars and contact data between our handhelds. I eventually tracked it down to a conflict with ituneshelper.exe, a TSR that iTunes loads and which serves no obvious purpose. Removing ituneshelper.exe from memory re-enabled WeSync. Unfortunately, there's no setting in iTunes to tell it NOT to run ituneshelper (even though iTunes seems to run fine without it).
Searching the web has revealed that ituneshelper has caused a fair bit of grief. Not only is there no authorized way to disable it (other than to uninstall iTunes), it causes conflicts with a variety of programs on both Windows and Mac systems. To compound my frustration, Apple's tech support knowledge-base turns up zero hits when searching for "ituneshelper" -- go figure.
So, at the moment, I'm a bit uneasy. I haven't any idea whether iTunes will continue to operate OK without ituneshelper.exe in memory and I hate the idea of having to manually shut that process down each time I reboot. I wish someone at Apple would let us know what the deal is and release a correction for it.
Posted by Craig in Music & Audio
Comments
You're using it with Windows...so what else do you expect? ;) I've never had a single issue with either the iPod or iTunes syncing with a Mac anyway in the year since I've had one. It sure beats the nightmare that is MusicMatch Jukebox, that's for sure. I'll never go back to how that whole experience was, finally buying a Mac was one of the smartest things I've ever done...
Posted by: Darrin at February 23, 2004 1:04 PM
You can try this Winamp 5 plug-in (http://winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=138888) so that you don't have to use iTunes. BTW, if you haven't used it yet, Winamp 5 is awesome. I avoided v.3 because it wasn't as simple as v.2 and seemed to run slower, but v.5 is built off of the best of v.2 and v.3 (2+3=5, go figure) and so far I'm loving it. =)
Other than the iTunes issue, how is the mini iPod itself? What made you decide on the mini instead of spending an extra $50 for the 15GB iPod? I'm still debating which one to get and so would like to know how you decided to get one over the other.
Posted by: Jen at February 23, 2004 1:39 PM
Jen, thanks for the plug-in tip...I'll check it out.
The iPod Mini itself is very cool. On the two tracks I tried last night before going to bed, the max volume was a little quieter than I had hoped, but it should be fine as my wife doesn't listen to her music very loud anyway. The interface is good -- I'm amazed at how responsive the controls are. Plus, the industrial design on the thing is just gorgeous -- turning it over in my hands, it's really easy to admire the look and feel of the unit. If the desktop side of things could be as nicely thought out, this would just be about perfect.
As far as our decision, to me it was pretty easy. My wife had no desire to keep 15 or 20 GB on hand (our current collection is about 50 GB) and the larger capacity devices were all significantly larger (e.g. double) in volume and/or weight. For my wife, portability was the "order winner" and capacity was an "order qualifier": the smaller the better as long as it had 1.5 GB or more (after all, how likely are you to listen to 1000 songs between having access to a PC with your _entire_ collection on it?). So, the smaller HD-based units were perfect for her needs.
Posted by: Craig at February 23, 2004 2:23 PM
I dunno if you guys have seen this yet:
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-5172851.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news
but looks like HP and Starbucks are getting into the music biz together. Could a Starbucks green HPPod mini be far behind?
Personally I think Starbucks sucks and is the coffee equivalent of WalMart, but that's not exactly on-point, now is it. ;-)
Posted by: JoeSchueller at March 12, 2004 3:25 PM
Use msconfig to stop itunershelp from running at startup. Start -> Run -> type msconfig -> click the startup tab and unckeck the ItunesHelp box. That will stop the program from running at startup so you dont have to keep ending the process everytime.
Posted by: Jason at March 17, 2004 2:24 PM
Good point, Jason...I forgot about msconfig. Thanks!
Posted by: Craig at March 18, 2004 12:40 AM
Handy tip if you think the volume is too low : pop into iTunes, and get the info on a song or a selection of songs and you can 'turn up' the volume on the selected songs. Generally used to balance out the fact that many tracks are recorded at different perceived volume levels.
Another useful (mac only - sorry) utility is iVolume - a nifty shareware app that uses a much more sophisticated volume leveling algorithm and allows you to choose the perceived output volume. Bumping it up to 100dB will make a significant difference.
Posted by: Erik at March 18, 2004 1:24 PM
you can always use real player 10.5 to sync wiv your iPod. My sister did after itunes stopped working with her ipod mini. we are using windows by the way.
Posted by: Tom at February 23, 2006 12:24 PM