IPOD Nano 8gb 5g review

So the thing looks and feels really, really cool, it felt good to have in my hand. The cool metal feeling made me feel like I was almost gripping something erotic. Then I plugged it into my computer, and the feeling changed from one of bliss, to kind of feeling like waking up in the morning after a drunken binge, next to a fat hairy guy, and you can't really remember what happened but your but kinda hurts.

I'll make no bones about loving Linux and abhoring the piece of Junk Redmond feigns to call an operating system. So all of my other devices just plug in and look like USB drives, my girlfriends freaking Palm does that and you already know what I think of that deprecated has been. To be fair, the IPOD does show up as a USB drive and you can copy music files to it, but then when you unplug it, it does not show that you have any Music on your IPOD.

So I embarked on a Journey of trying to get one of the many programs that can load music onto IPODS from Linux, most of them depend on a library called libgpod. This library is used by many of the Linux applications that manage your music library to easily sync your music with your IPOD.

The problem is that instead of the IPOD seeing that there is new files on it's drive and figuring out how to index them in it's database, the IPOD depends on an external application to update their little SQL database with artists and titles, etc. That's where libgpod comes in. Problem is Apple has changed the format, (once again), so none of the program that work with the previous versions of IPOD's work with the 5g (5th generation) IPODS.

After trying to download and compile libgpod from source and applying patches from the net. I finally admitted defeat and downloaded iTunes. Are you kidding me?!? 300mb and a half hour installation, just to get some MP3 files copied to my music player?? Apple can put it in a sexy package and make it simple, but they are as bad as the evil that lurks in Redmond when it comes to being closed and proprietary.

So my advice, unless you want to look cool, but fail in the tech department, get one of these. If you want a simple to use, low profile music player, there are many out there. Make sure you get a player that doesn't need additional software installed on your machine, that's really the key. You should just be able to plug the player into a USB port, then drag and drop supported format files onto it and be done. The player should figure out from what you load on it, what to do with it and should not require additional software be installed.

That's my Music Player design lesson for the day, class dismissed :p