I-river > I-Pod ?

[Ocelaris]

Ok, I got an I-River H-120 the other day, and it's great, can do wav, mp3, FLAC, ogg (haven't used it yet though), etc... has a digital optical output, and I can drag and drop folders once I'm plugged in via USB like it's another drive...

This is with the rockbox software... When I was looking for a hard drive based MP3 player, it was the tweaking/hacking following I was looking for and I-River has that...

Besides the headunit interface compatability that Ipod has, why would one use an Ipod? Can you hook it up via USB and just drag and drop folders? Do you have to use the I-Tunes interface? My sister lost all of her music she had acquired legially through I-Tunes (downloaded) when I reformatted her computer, I was not about to have the same thing happen to me... Can you get around these issues with an I-pod? Or... I'm sure people have opinions on this...

Another question, how/what do people use for sources in their vehicles besides the in-dash CD players? I think it sounds alot better coming from my I-river than from a CD, albeit the interface is a bit klunky. I don't really want to have to boot up with a carputer, but I am willing to pay up for a decent interface to a hard drive based system if it can provide better sound quality... which is specifically why I picked the I-River because it has a digital optical output which I am eventually going to hook up to an H701 or equivalent...

[DS-21]

Besides the headunit interface compatability that Ipod has, why would one use an Ipod?

Because it has a superior user interface, makes finding that one song of 6000 easier, looks far better, and integrates properly with well-designed computers.

To my knowledge, all music must be loaded through iTunes, which is not a bad thing as it's a superior program. It does mount as a Firewire (or USB, I suppose, for people with lesser machines) hard drive for moving files between machines. As for losing stuff, the simple and obvious answer is to back up your computer! Really, external Firewire (or USB) hard drives are so cheap that there's no excuse not to have one set up to back up all of your important stuff every other day or so.

Another question, how/what do people use for sources in their vehicles besides the in-dash CD players?

NPR.

[Finleyville]

I love my iRiver H-120. I am very glad I chose it over the ipod. While the user interface is the best in the industry, my H120 beats it in other areas including sound quality, digital output, drag-n-drop, ect. While my HD in the H120 did fail losing 15Gig of music earlier this year (no backups :mad: ), it just gave me an excuse to upgrade the HD to a 30Gig unit instead!

Rockbox does look like an outstanding interface in its own right. But for me it has one killer flaw: no genre filtering! Since I ONLY listen to music grouped together by genre I will not be upgrading. I always could make playlists by genre, but that would take too much time always adding songs to many playlists every time I ripped new music.

[chad]

I recently bought a 20G H10, I am very happy with the purchase and did a lot of research. Many have said that it sounded better than the iPod. I was very against Itunes manipulating my files to make them work with the iPod. I have no idea how the H-120 works but the H10 will sync with Window Media Player, or facilitate drag and drop. This will aslo allow gnere grouping. It's a great unit, was cheaper than the equiv ipod and sounds great even in applications it was not intended for.

If I was a mac user I may chane my tune, it just seems the iriver windows support ROCKS! The drawback I see is the small amount of support in the accessories arena. As of now the cradle for the H10 20G just became available, but they are out of AC adaptors. It's imposssile to run down to wally-world and grab an accessory.

Chad

[Ocelaris]

Well, the issue is not backing up. the Digital Rights Management is what killed all the music on my sister's computer. She had all the "liscenses" on that WinXP operating system, and since the OS was plagued by spyware, had to wipe it. Hence when "itunes" was reinstalled, anything that was on her i-pod, but not on her computer was "illegal"...

We had copies of all the mp3s, but the aac or whatever proprietary itunes music format is, all those songs were lost...

That's sort of the thing, I go with my instincts, and because I saw a antiestablishment group backing the I-River, that made up my decision, and I seem to have made the right choice, but wanted to see if any Ipod users had any work arounds for bypassing the whole Digital Rights Management issues (folder dropping) since I refuse to be forced to use a proprietary GUI and be out of control of my hard drive based MP3 Player.


The physical touch interface doesn't really bother me, I find the scroll wheel a tad inaccurate, but cool none-the-less... However the lack of interface with an alpine headunit bothers me... if there was just a way to get past I-tunes... and get Digital optical out, and be able to drag and drop folders...

[DS-21]

Well, the issue is not backing up. the Digital Rights Management is what killed all the music on my sister's computer. She had all the "liscenses" on that WinXP operating system, and since the OS was plagued by spyware, had to wipe it. Hence when "itunes" was reinstalled, anything that was on her i-pod, but not on her computer was "illegal"...

If she still has the files still then it's trivial to reassign the DRM to her new setup, whether it's on the same computer or a new one. (For example, if she gets sick of badly designed boxes riddled with spyware, she could de-authorize her old crash-box and authorize her shiny new Mac.) There are instructions on Apple's website. That assumes, of course, that she bought them in the first place rather than being given them by someone who didn't have 5 computers (or 3, whatever Fairplay's limit is; until iTunes Music Store sells lossless files I won't be buying much music there)

[ArcL100]

I cannot believe that I can drag-and-drop files onto my IShuffle, but can't do that with music files to listen too. Looking through 5000 files with incorrect filenames in Itunes for the songs I want is a horrible experience. Usually I make a new folder whenever I'm burning a CD for the songs I want - with ITunes I just do this then add the folder in the playlist and then choose from "recently added files" and just import them in there. MAC OS is retarded.

My friends Dell mp3 player plugged into an older Alpine sounded absolutely horrible. Every song was disgustingly flat and lacking detail compared to conventionally burned wav cd-r's. I haven't heard any other setup, but I've been leary of mp3 players hooked up to home or car setups ever since.

And Ipods don't look sweet - that's just a placebo of thier marketing. A thermoset cheap white plastic box looks great :rolleyes: lol

-aaron

[chad]

I cannot believe that I can drag-and-drop files onto my IShuffle, but can't do that with music files to listen too. Looking through 5000 files with incorrect filenames in Itunes for the songs I want is a horrible experience. Usually I make a new folder whenever I'm burning a CD for the songs I want - with ITunes I just do this then add the folder in the playlist and then choose from "recently added files" and just import them in there. MAC OS is retarded.

My friends Dell mp3 player plugged into an older Alpine sounded absolutely horrible. Every song was disgustingly flat and lacking detail compared to conventionally burned wav cd-r's. I haven't heard any other setup, but I've been leary of mp3 players hooked up to home or car setups ever since.

And Ipods don't look sweet - that's just a placebo of thier marketing. A thermoset cheap white plastic box looks great :rolleyes: lol

-aaron

I tend to agree, I was turned off By MP3 at first and am still very leary. BUT I have found the proper CODEC is the key! I have found that the Fraunhofer codec just ROCKS! Not nearly as swishy and lifeless as others. Give it a shot, you may change your tune a little, I did, "a little" :)

Everything digital has compression, It HAS to, PCM on a CD is compression. We have learned to accept it. I still like plopping a 12" chunk of wax on the turntable on a regular basis though!

[DS-21]

And Ipods don't look sweet - that's just a placebo of thier marketing. A thermoset cheap white plastic box looks great :rolleyes: lol

You sound like one of those people who thinks that an Aeron (http://www.hermanmiller.com/CDA/SSA/Product/0,1592,a10-c440-p8,00.html) is overpriced without having ever bothered to sit in one...

Whether you personally like it or not, the iPod is probably the premiere industrial design icon of our era.

[ArcL100]

You sound like one of those people who thinks that an Aeron (http://www.hermanmiller.com/CDA/SSA/Product/0,1592,a10-c440-p8,00.html) is overpriced without having ever bothered to sit in one...

If I'm one of those, you = one of these people (http://www.atl3.com/setzer/odd/iproduct.w492.jpg)

As an IDSA member, Industrial Design major, having sat in an Aeron, and comming off a trip to Steelcase (http://www.steelcase.com/na/) last week, I'd say I've heard of the Aeron ;)

There are other notable desings of our era that have a little more prevalence with those outside of gen-y, including Dyson, plasma screens, etc.

-aaron

[Ocelaris]

now now, being sensible... My wife is going to go back to school for industrial design or something similar, any schools you think she might look at seeing how you're both ID experts ;) Seriously, drop me a PM if we're getting off topic.

I think the Ipod was good for what it was, getting the masses into digital media... there is always going to be subjectively "better" options for those willing to go off the beaten path, but it has at least gotten people comfortable with not having a disk for each album.

[ArcL100]

pmed 8)

-aaron

[blackreplica]

There is no way an ipod could be compared to something like the iriver H100 series IMO. The only thing ipod has is a cool white box and a scroll wheel. The user interface to me on the iriver is just as good as that of the ipod, but this is a subjective issue.

How about the facts then? The iriver natively supports optical in/out, has an FM tuner, recording capability (optical and analog). It works just like a USB drive for both data and music, perfect plug, drop in the music/data, and play. With the ipod you have to use itunes. With rockbox, which i currently use, it plays mp3, wav, flac, wavpack, and soon, AAC as well. Music is played gapless, and you can customise your playlists on-the-fly. You can customise everything with rockbox, from caching, to buffer sizes and skip protection timing, and the wps (or, while playing screen). The iriver does NOT have a documented and confirmed bass rolloff issue which the ipod has when it is used with low impedance headphones. The casing of the H100 series is made of metal, magnesium i believe, though i could be wrong. Oh, and my favourite part....the iriver actually comes with a proper wall wart 5V charger. The ipod comes with a USB charger only so you have to leave your pc on to charge it, am i right? If so, what a joke...well, you could always buy an apple wall wart for 20 bucks :rolleyes:

Nice to know apple take pride in using only the most durable and high quality materials for their products too. See here: http://www.nanoscratch.com/
Great work, steve jobs :rolleyes:

Arc100's link http://www.atl3.com/setzer/odd/iproduct.w492 about the general ipod buyer couldnt be more true and funny

[ATB]

comming off a trip to Steelcase (http://www.steelcase.com/na/) last week,

-aaron

The Steelcase Leap chair is one of the best I have ever sat in. I had an Aeron at my last job and I could never get comfortable in it.

[DS-21]

If I'm one of those, you = one of these people (http://www.atl3.com/setzer/odd/iproduct.w492.jpg)

Wouldn't you know, I have that "iProduct" parody on my fridge. It's very funny. And Apple's hipper-than-thou image does get old, especially since Apple spends almost nothing on good causes. (Unlike, say, evil Microsoft, without which there would be no Gates Foundation (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/AboutUs/)). The "problem" is, however, that Apple's been on a tremendous roll recently. I think it's a similar situation to VW and Audi in the mid-late 1990s and just beyond, when every single one of their cars from the Lupo to the A8 was by a huge margin the best designed (if not necessarily most reliable, quickest, most efficient, best value, best handling, etc.) model in its class. VW has stumbled pretty hard design-wise of late, and chances are Apple will at some point, too. But for now it's quite a ride!

As an IDSA member, Industrial Design major, having sat in an Aeron, and comming off a trip to Steelcase (http://www.steelcase.com/na/) last week, I'd say I've heard of the Aeron ;)

As for Steelcase, they make some nice stuff. I had a Steelcase desk, something vaguely Austrian sounding with an "dl" at the end, in my old office. It was nice, liberating and not confining like a heavy carved wood slab. I'm not a huge fan of the Leap, though. It's probably my fifth-favorite high-end task chair, behind the HM Aeron, Humanscale Freedom Chair, Humanscale Liberty Chair, and the Teknion Contessa. (In my home office, a lime-green mesh on aluminum frame Contessa replaced a stark black Aeron that I passed down to my baby sister.) Admittedly, I've never tried Knoll's task chair (Life?) but after auditioning the Contessa I could not think of a compelling reason to keep shopping! :)

(And for the record an Aeron can easily be uncomfortable if the bottom section isn't properly sized. Unlike newer task chair designs the bottom cushion comes in three discrete sizes rather than adjusting. That meant purchasing departments often just bought all size-B chairs, and lots of people found the Aeron to be overrated. I wouldn't be a fan of Kiton suits and sportscoats if they only came in size 50, either....)

There are other notable desings of our era that have a little more prevalence with those outside of gen-y, including Dyson, plasma screens, etc.

The flat-panel TV and computer monitor (LCD or plasma) is a paradigm shift, not an iconic design. Everybody wants one so they can get the infernal box out of the way, not because any of them are so compellingly well designed. As for the Dyson, it is probably up there with the iPod in terms of iconicness, and vacuums are indeed relevant to Gen Xer's like me, being in a stage of life where most of us still have to vacuum ourselves rather than being in a position to pay someone else to do it.

But as for the iPod's hold on the imaginations of people beyond your or my generations, consider the following anecdote. My paternal grandmother lives in a developing country, in a city that's large enough to have cable TV but too small to support broadband internet. She also has massively degraded eyesight, thanks to a botched cornea transplant, and has never used a computer in her entire life. However, she had an idea to get each of her grandkids (there are 18 of us) something for Eid al-Fitr (the holiday marking the end of the month of Ramadan) instead of giving us cash as she usually does. So what did she ask each our parents? If we already had iPods.

[ArcL100]

I think it's a similar situation to VW and Audi in the mid-late 1990s and just beyond, when every single one of their cars from the Lupo to the A8 was by a huge margin the best designed (if not necessarily most reliable, quickest, most efficient, best value, best handling, etc.) model in its class. VW has stumbled pretty hard design-wise of late, and chances are Apple will at some point, too. But for now it's quite a ride!


Heh, when I was @Johnson Controls yesterday they were actually in process of comming up with something for the new VW Passat, as sales are poor and they're supposed to be hitting the 20-30's demo, and failing.

Ipods arent bad products, but the marketing on them is what brought them into pop culture, there's no arguing around that. MP3 players have been around for over 5 years, but now everyone on campus feels the need to drop $300 to listen to mp3s on thier 5 min walk to class.

And screw popculture anyways - anything that appeals to the lowest common denominator is usually pretty unbearable for someone like me (ie the entire MTV channel) 8).

-aaron

[DS-21]

Heh, when I was @Johnson Controls yesterday they were actually in process of comming up with something for the new VW Passat, as sales are poor and they're supposed to be hitting the 20-30's demo, and failing.

To be expected, when you go from a Teutonic masterpiece that made a lot of people reconsider the value proposition of BMW 5-series and M-B E-Classes (and A6's, too) to a sedan that from the outside could just as easily be the next Camry or Accord and then stick a horrible chrome bib on its chin. But at least they're not Subaru, who hired the designer of the stunning and seductive Alfa 147 only to find that his true calling was adapting the Edsel to modern times.
(That said, Civic ripoff looks or not, if we get the Golf with the cool new engine they're offering in Europe - that'll be a great car for the modern, educated middle-class family.

Ipods arent bad products, but the marketing on them is what brought them into pop culture, there's no arguing around that. MP3 players have been around for over 5 years, but now everyone on campus feels the need to drop $300 to listen to mp3s on thier 5 min walk to class.

I disagree. How many large-capacity MP3 players have you owned over those five years they've been on the market? Since 2000 I've owned three: a Neo25, an Archos Jukebox, and a 4G iPod. Of those, I used the Archos for the longest time by far, from the end of 2001 until the end of 2004. For at least two years, I resisted the iPod because of the pop culture buzz that seems to turn lots of other people off as well. However, I was as wrong then as you are now. The reason earlier players did not compel the average college kid to drop $300 on a music player - though in fairness when I was an undergrad tons of people carried their portable CD players around, so the desire to listen to music on those five minute walks to class is not by any means a new phenomenon - is because, quite frankly, they sucked. They took forever to load your library upon startup, they crashed, they lasted maybe 8 hours on a charge, navigation was clunky, and instead of having a streamlined, path-breaking interface through which to manage your music collection at home they made you drag stuff into folders as if it were a common piece of junk computer hardware rather than a toy to play music.

And screw popculture anyways

Stopped clocks are right twice a day, and the iPod is right at 12:00...

[ArcL100]

I disagree. How many large-capacity MP3 players have you owned over those five years they've been on the market? Since 2000 I've owned three: a Neo25, an Archos Jukebox, and a 4G iPod. Of those, I used the Archos for the longest time by far, from the end of 2001 until the end of 2004. For at least two years, I resisted the iPod because of the pop culture buzz that seems to turn lots of other people off as well. However, I was as wrong then as you are now. The reason earlier players did not compel the average college kid to drop $300 on a music player - though in fairness when I was an undergrad tons of people carried their portable CD players around, so the desire to listen to music on those five minute walks to class is not by any means a new phenomenon - is because, quite frankly, they sucked. They took forever to load your library upon startup, they crashed, they lasted maybe 8 hours on a charge, navigation was clunky, and instead of having a streamlined, path-breaking interface through which to manage your music collection at home they made you drag stuff into folders as if it were a common piece of junk computer hardware rather than a toy to play music.

Ipods satisfy a want/need that most people didn't even have or realize before Ipods - marketing 101. Yes, some of the owners went from walkmans to Ipods, but a lot were comming from using nothing. The point I'm making is that the portable music device market has been around for quite some time, yet the typical Ipod owner is ignorant to this fact, and also generally unaware of the competition's offerings. This is because Apple's brainwashing makes it seem like Ipods are the first and only option for portable music - again marketing.

Ipods are an overall decent product, but there are other mp3s players out there that should be more sucessful were it not for Apple's stranglehold on popculture. Take for example a $50 1 gb flash drive Rio mp3 player - not only does it have more storage then a $100 shuffle, it also features an lcd screen which is what most people want, so how come I don't ever see these but I see shuffles on campus?

Does gen y really have this surplus of expendable income where they can ignore cheaper and equally performing alternatives, or is it because of Apple's influence that theyre happy to plunk down $$$ to have the same thing Jimmy has? Even if the Ipod is in fact overall a better product, there's stil a reason(pricing) people purchase vehicles like cavaliers(Rio) over accords(Ipod), but youre not seeing that much with the mp3 player market.

Also, there's a reason why people purchase a BMW(Ipod) over a VW(Dell) - status. Ipod is a fad product that kids with little income are willing to shell out to be on-level with thier peers.

I stick by my notion that Ipods are 2 parts genius marketing, and 1 part good product - not the other way around - purely based on the fact that many buyers are unfamiliar with the competition. In this thread or on ECA and you'll see people using a lot of different products other then Ipods which just shows that Ipod is not the end-all product. However if you look around public areas and what theyre using, you'd think otherwise.

Am I totally off-base here?

-aaron

[DS-21]

Ipods satisfy a want/need that most people didn't even have or realize before Ipods - marketing 101. Yes, some of the owners went from walkmans to Ipods, but a lot were comming from using nothing.

I'm sure that's true for lots of segments of the population, but it's very much the opposite of my experience. As an undergrad I saw a whole lot of portable CD players in libraries, in buses, and walking from class to class. Also, well before the iPod craze any decent city (i.e. one with a well-running and extensive mass transit system) had headphones all over the place.

The point I'm making is that the portable music device market has been around for quite some time, yet the typical Ipod owner is ignorant to this fact, and also generally unaware of the competition's offerings. This is because Apple's brainwashing makes it seem like Ipods are the first and only option for portable music - again marketing.

Actually, I think it's more because the quote-unquote competition just doesn't have what it takes to compete for non-techie types, so people see them in the box stores and skip over them.

Ipods are an overall decent product, but there are other mp3s players out there that should be more sucessful were it not for Apple's stranglehold on popculture. Take for example a $50 1 gb flash drive Rio mp3 player - not only does it have more storage then a $100 shuffle, it also features an lcd screen which is what most people want, so how come I don't ever see these but I see shuffles on campus?

Well, the Rio - speaking of which, DM Holdings dissolved the brand because they realized it was silly to have a second-rate digital player maker stealing engineers from McIntosh, Marantz, and Denon - does not integrate seamlessly with iTunes, so there's two strikes against it already. If you have to use the damn thing like a piece of computer hardware - especially a piece of Windows hardware, with all the infernal compatibilities and driver issues and crashing and so on - instead of a music player that happens to get its music off your computer, the masses won't be interested.

Also, what gave you the idea that people want LCD screens on their 3"x0.5" portable players? Not having parts like screens to break isn't necessarily a bad thing for Shuffle owners like me; I use mine (a 512MB stick acquired free upon the opening of a brokerage account) when I train and when I need to grab a file that's over Gmail's 10MB limit to take home, neither task being helped in the slightest by a cheap LCD I have to squint to read. While I thought it was a gimmick at first, Autofill is actually really neat. I'd go so far as to say that being surprised and delighted by the music it decides to pull has made my workouts better. As opposed to Dashboard in OSX Tiger, which I thought would be super cool but that I can't say I've used once since the week after I upgraded from Panther to Tiger.

Does gen y really have this surplus of expendable income where they can ignore cheaper and equally performing alternatives,

While I think you're wrong on the equally-performing part because to most people the most important factors in a toy are how easy it is to use and how cool it looks, from all indications yes Gen Y is swimming in disposable income. Being a grad student at a large public university in a college town most of the people I pass in the streets right now are millennials. There is definitely a sense of money to burn even on this public campus, even if the cars or the shoes aren't in general as nice as one finds on an elite private college campus. Insane numbers of of people drive megatrucks and monstrous SUVs, which is really the ultimate in wanton gluttony in addition to being a sign of profound moral weakness. Check out a cute coed's butt and what are you going to see? Invariably those jeans are going to be Paper Denim Cloths, Sevens, or True Religions, with $200 pricetags. Until recently, we Gen Xer's bought Gap or Levis jeans at $35 a pair, or maybe had a few pairs of $80 Diesels in our closet and maybe a single $150 pair of Helmut Langs, the latter only if we lived in NYC or traveled to Europe often. Guys around here wear lots of Lacoste polo shirts, which are overpriced and (since they moved production from France to Peru, at least, and went to thinner buttons that are not even mother of pearl) not even of great quality. Not only that, on long weekends they run off to party in Florida, and so on.

The point is, if you think the issue is decadence among kids, the iPod is only the barest dent on the surface. There's a reason that a mini cancel-the-prom movement has sprung up...

(Never mind that the market for portable music players isn't driven entirely or even mostly by echo boomers.)

it because of Apple's influence that theyre happy to plunk down $$$ to have the same thing Jimmy has? Even if the Ipod is in fact overall a better product, there's stil a reason(pricing) people purchase vehicles like cavaliers(Rio) over accords(Ipod), but youre not seeing that much with the mp3 player market.

Then again, a car is a necessity for most and a music player is a luxury. Also, the price differential is much different. Going from a Chevy Cobalt to an Audi TT is a good $25k or more, so the two markets aren't in the same world. But going from a lesser music player to an iPod is maybe $50-100. Or, to give you another analogy: even though they're technically similar, priced not that far apart, have similarly appalling reliability, and are both more or less frivolous purchases anyway, you don't see much overlap between Audi TT quattro and Mitsubishi Evo shoppers.

And there's another barrier in that you won't be able to find a cool case for it or take advantage of the number of other iPod accessories.

A third attack on your line of reasoning: if Apple's marketers are so adept at programming people to want their products, how come the vast majority of computer users aren't using Macs? They have the same aura of hipness that the iPod does, after all, and many of the same "it just works" advantages. A Dell kiosk in a mall is kind of sad, Gateway tried to do stores but ran away with their tail between their legs, yet Apple Stores are relentlessly packed and hugely profitable. It's so funny to see people's relative reactions to these things. Somebody opens a Dell or other anonymous box in a coffee house, nobody notices. However, even if someone opens a little 12" iBook in the same space, and there are sidelong glances all over the place. Yet all those people looking on enviously aren't trashing their Dells and Thinkpads for better laptops the next day. So clearly marketing isn't everything.

I stick by my notion that Ipods are 2 parts genius marketing, and 1 part good product - not the other way around - purely based on the fact that many buyers are unfamiliar with the competition.

I think you've got it reversed. It's a toweringly excellent product (that incidentally I think is in the process of getting worse at the top of its range, due to silly feature bloat) against which the competition has simply not been able to mount a serious riposte. So instead they go after tiny niches like people who don't care about automated music management but find an optical digital output on their portable digital players useful. And there's nothing wrong with that, but being more of a pain to use and having more bells and whistles does not make the competition ipso facto better, nor is it a compromise resonates in the slightest with the typical music player buyer.

In this thread or on ECA and you'll see people using a lot of different products other then Ipods which just shows that Ipod is not the end-all product.

Actually, it shows no such thing. What it shows is that there's another market willing to give up some usability and elegance for flexibility and features. However, it also shows that segment of the digital music player market to be dwarfed by the segment who just wants to be able to plug their iPod into their Dock, sync with iTunes, select "shuffle", and go off happily enjoying their music collections. And frankly the iPod should make the reactionary, hypernationalist ignorant tightass club at ECA happy, because it is a rare instance of an American-designed product being manifestly superior to its Asian-designed knockoffs. I'm not saying the iPod or even iTunes is perfect - one thing Apple needs to do post-haste, IMO, is give you a check-box in iTunes' preferences to convert all Lossless files to one's favored lossy format/bitrate for portable use, so people don't have to maintain parallel libraries - but it does, ahem, just work.

PS: If you're going to capitalize, at least do it right: it's "iPod" not "Ipod".

[racerraul]

... integrates properly with well-designed computers...

... It does mount as a Firewire (or USB, I suppose, for people with lesser machines)...

LOL... :D You're a riot man :D