Some Non-Technical iPod Questions

[chopin1810]

Okay, I'm finally going to give in and buy an iPod, or at least some sort of portable music player (MP3 player is inaccurate, since none of them use MP3s by default anymore.) I'm trying to not just buy an iPod for the coolness of owning one, since I've heard a lot of people say they've got crummy batteries. I had a generation one Mini about two years ago but it sucked so badly I thought it was a lemon, so I called Apple for a new one under my warranty. They wouldn't honor it so I ended up throwing it out it was such a piece of garbage. The battery would die out in one hours even though it was supposed to last 18 hours on full blast. I looked for possible hacks on the web but people said that, like, every Mini has that problem. So I threw it out. And I've never been too happy with Apple's digital music business since then (their computers rock though.)
So now I might buy an actual iPod this time since they have their "fifth generation" so they should have had lots of time to work out the bugs. I've got a few questions though.
1.) Is it supported well by Linux? Is the software just crap-worthy or does it actually work well?
2.) Have any of you had any battery problems with the new iPods?
3.) Do they actually work well overall? Are they worth spending 350$ on??
4.) How's the video look? It can't look that good.

[George Harrison]

I own a 4th gen iPod.

1. Support.. hmm.. I dunno if it's officially supported (probably not) but SuSE has offered a little support towards the iPod since 9.3, although I don't use it. I use gtkpod for all of my iPod needs, works perfectly.

2. My battery sucks. My old sony walkman player from a few years back is stunning on battery life, I could run that thing forever on two AA's it seemed like.

3. I spent $300 on mine (20GB) and it's ok, lately I've been ripping songs onto my SuSE box and encoding them in .flac so I dunno if it's supported with an iPod, so far my luck as been fairly low with the iPod. It works, it scratches easily, the batt. sucks, but it does work and it's good storage space.

4. N/A for me.

In conclusion.. I dunno, if I were you I'd just buy from iriver or a creative flash memory player. Do not buy Creative's hdd players, they all suck.

[techieMoe]

Okay, I'm finally going to give in and buy an iPod, or at least some sort of portable music player (MP3 player is inaccurate, since none of them use MP3s by default anymore.)

Umm.. Last I checked my iPod uses all MP3s. Sure, Apple has their M4A protected tracks, but I don't keep them on mine.

I'm trying to not just buy an iPod for the coolness of owning one, since I've heard a lot of people say they've got crummy batteries.

I've owned a 3rd generation 20GB, a 4th generation 40GB, a second generation 6GB Mini, and a 4GB Nano. I have not had any battery issues. The Mini got the best battery life of them all, at roughly 18 hours a charge.

1.) Is it supported well by Linux? Is the software just crap-worthy or does it actually work well?

SuSE allows you to mount them and drag and drop music as well as browse by album, but there is no "iTunes" application for Linux, or even anything close that I've seen. AmaroK works great to manage music on your local computer, but I haven't seen it work for syncing with an iPod.

2.) Have any of you had any battery problems with the new iPods?

I'm not the best one to ask because I didn't have any battery problems with the OLD iPods.

3.) Do they actually work well overall? Are they worth spending 350$ on??

I can't possibly answer that question for you. Do you think they're worth it?

4.) How's the video look? It can't look that good.

Not bad, actually. I've played with them at the Apple store. I have no use for a video iPod though, so I wouldn't buy it for that particular feature.

[Muser]

Check out gtkpod. Supports many features, including podcasts and videos.

[Weedman]

Do not buy Creative's hdd players, they all suck.

what do:

a) you mean by hdd player (zen touch?)
b)if it is a zen touch, what have you found to be wrong with them?

i have a friend who has a zen touch 20gb and i have another friend who has an ipod u2 special edition.
the zen touch kicks the ipods a$$ for everything except getting music off the player (for which they both suck).

whats wrong with them?

[yourname3232]

I have a iPod nano, I get 14.5 hours battery (I tested it). I havn't had ANY problems with it. I think that it is absolutely awsome. But if you do get a 5th gen iPod do remember to get a case for it. They scratch oh so easily. I like the agent 18 cases but that is just me.

[techieMoe]

i have a friend who has a zen touch 20gb and i have another friend who has an ipod u2 special edition.
the zen touch kicks the ipods a$$ for everything except getting music off the player (for which they both suck).

whats wrong with them?

The user interface on the Creative players makes no sense to me. The buttons aren't responsive enough. The few people I know who have bought the Zen players have reported random catastrophic failures. One actually had to return his 20GB Zen twice before he just said screw it and got an iPod. But, to each their own.

[zachtib]

My iPod works great, and the battery life has never been an issue (4th gen photo 30gb)
I would reccomend yamipod (google it) for managing it, it acctually installs TO the ipod and can be used on linux, mac OR windows to add or remove music from your ipod. very handy (note: on some distros, the ipod may not mount with the executable permission set, so it will not run straight off the ipod, but a simple drag and drop to the desktop before running fixes all of that)

[Weedman]

bugger me! Thanks for that techieMoe. It sounds like the creative mp3 players (or hdd players) have almost the same problems as the ipods. But neither are perfect by the looks of it.