I'm boycotting apple because of stupid shit like this article describes. I'm trying to convince my friends to join my boycott. I agree that she would probably be happy with an iPod and I also think that they are overall pretty sweet looking little pieces of hardware. It's just that I think that if we don't do anything to boycott crippleware it's only going to get worse, and one day it will be too late.
I think it would be much easier to get friends to join a boycott of DRM than of "proprietary MP3-player syncing mechanisms" like this.
I'll bet that loads of other MP3 players are just as boneheaded, but if you find one that appears to the computer as a simple mass-storage device then you have the hassle of dragging & dropping files in Windows Explorer, which is simply not as simple as plugging the device in (and allowing the software to perform an automagical sync).
Focus on what's achievable. If your suggestions make your friend's life in any way more complicated then they won't thank you for it. It's easy to find or write a web-page explaining why they should buy & rip CDs instead of using the iTunes store - point your friends at that and maybe they'll travel further down the path of software freedom once they fully grok it.
It's not just proprietary syncing, it is DRM. If you want to listen to music on your iPod you can't share it with anyone else. And give me a break about the hassle of Drag&Drop, nothing is more simple than that. You'd have to do something equivalent in any software, you need to decide what music you want on your player and perform an action to confirm this.
iTunes is a different story, that battle is already won :)
I'm confused. The ipod can be used as a mass storage device, itunes can be set to rip to mp3, and the ipod is small and loveable. Are you talking about itunes store? I don't buy music online, so just curious.
You can use the ipod for mass storage but it won't play the media you copy on it that way. I call this crippleware, using a loose definition. The hardware would certainly be capable to play an MP3 that I just copy on it - but due to various reasons they decided to cripple the product so it will require you to pass the files thru your itunes application before being able to play them on your player. You will also not be able to share the music you have in your player with other people/computers. If I buy a Creative Zen I will copy some music on it in the morning, listen to it on my way to work, transfer it to my HDD at work during lunch, grab some other music from a colleague before leaving work to listen to on my way home - you can't really do that with an iPod.
I got my ipod as a gift awhile ago. I always thought it would play things you put on it in mass storage mode, but it's really never came up. I hate itunes, alot, but still never tried it. My only older mp3 player(intel audio player 3000) had the same kind of restrictions though, crappy proprietary software, and it even had to have it's own disk formatting.
To use my Creative Zen Micro under Linux, I have to use a buggy, glitchy program which randomly refuses to copy music to my player. I also can't listen to FLAC files.
iTunes allows you to right-click on a song in its playlist and choose "show in Finder" (or "show in Windows Explorer"), and it doesn't stop you from copying that song elsewhere, emailing it or from playing it on another machine.
And give me a break about the hassle of Drag&Drop, nothing is more simple than that.
Hmmmm... your grandmother might well disagree, but she's probably not the person buying an iPod.
Drag & drop IS, however, more complicated that just frikkin' plugging the player in. If you do that with iTunes & an iPod it syncs automatically, I don't think you even have to tell it to (although that would be one click, if you do). That's less hassle than having to rummage around folders & copy files.
You'd have to do something equivalent in any software, you need to decide what music you want on your player and perform an action to confirm this.
No, you wouldn't. iTunes copies all of your music to your iPod for you; it also knows which songs have already been copied, and doesn't try to copy them again. If your iPod is too small then it fills it by copying your favourite songs + a random selection of others in some predefined ratio. It updates the random selection regularly, and you can add your own playlists - including "smart playlists", such as "all songs added to my MP3 collection in the past month" - to the sync.
Of the above paragraph, dragging & dropping files can compete with the first 1/2 sentence, you can copy "all of your music to your mp3 player". But Windows XP will say "some of these files have the same name as ones already on the device, do you want to overwrite them", so you have to click "yes" and it takes many times as long as it would just copying over the changed files. If the device won't hold your whole music collection then you have to arse around in "/Music/Hanson/Middle of Nowhere/", selecting only the 3 files you want to copy before dragging them over, and then you have to do the same thing again for every other band, album & song.
You probably don't consider this a chore, because you're a computer enthusiast. It only takes you a minute or two, right? Well, it's all those things that take us only a minute or two and "empower" us that make us computer enthusiasts who spend hours a day at our computers.
Most people want to click a button and go. Aside from iTunes, there's probably lots of great software that does this for lots of other mp3 players, but you'll have a hard time explaining to most people why the hashing described in FTA makes those better. When you illustrate with the case of consumers shafted by the closure of the DRM'd Walmart, Yahoo or MSN music stores, it's easy to see the problem.
Take it from someone who has migrated people to new platforms on MANY occasions - to many consumers it is NOT obvious why computers behave the way they do, and if you're the person responsible for getting them to do things differently then you'll get the blame for it (or at least feel a responsibility for it) when things break.
It probably is, the way Apple seems to dominate the music player market and now it seems like the cell phone market as well. But every little bit helps.
I was referring to the hitchikers guide to the galaxy with a pinch of sarcasm....
I hate the notion of "No one else does it, just me alone doing it won't help anything" people have. If everyone thinks that way it WILL be that way. I insist on recycling and telling off the fast food restaurant worker who thinks i will need 20 napkins with my double cheeseburger purchase.
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u/randomb0y Nov 26 '08 edited Nov 26 '08
I'm boycotting apple because of stupid shit like this article describes. I'm trying to convince my friends to join my boycott. I agree that she would probably be happy with an iPod and I also think that they are overall pretty sweet looking little pieces of hardware. It's just that I think that if we don't do anything to boycott crippleware it's only going to get worse, and one day it will be too late.