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Apple’s iTunes is great – if you have an iPod.

Which I don’t anymore, since my preschooler daughter accidentally knocked it on to the tile floor. All it does now is show me the “sad iPod” icon which was cute the first time I saw it but now taunts me with its dead eyes.

Sad iPod is sad.

I even took the little guy apart. It wasn’t hard – it’s a 5th-generation iPod with a little hard drive, and I was able to pry it open with my fingernails. I tried to see if it could be fixed by resetting a cable, but no luck. I think the hard drive is toast.

Apple can fix it for $130, plus shipping. Forget it. Instead, I spent $60 on a Sandisk Sansa View. It’s not as elegant as the iPod, its menu system is OK but not what I’m used to and it’s got a lot less memory than the old iPod (eight GB compared to 30).

But it was on sale.

It’s smaller and uses flash memory instead of a little hard drive. And apparently it plays videos too, but I haven’t played around with that feature yet.

Best of all, it lets me put files on through drag-and-drop. Easy. The View automatically organizes files based on the information in the ID tags written into the file, letting me play albums, which is what I prefer.

This works with all the MP3s I’ve made myself, ripping my CDs with Exact Audio Copy. I gave up on iTunes’ built-in ripper ages ago when I found it was creating files with random popping errors. EAC is slower, but no errors. Plus, it tags files with standard ID tags.

Which, apparently, iTunes does not. When I tried to play some of the songs I’d bought with iTunes on my View, the songs showed up in the menu all out of order and the album art was missing. In fact, the art for a lot of my albums was missing, even though I had added it in iTunes.

I guess iTunes must not write the data into the tag, storing it on the computer and on the iPod or something. Whatever. It’s stupid. Stick to industry standards, please!

So, after a few hours with MediaMonkey, I have re-organized my music  and everything is all tagged, embedded with artwork and working properly. I hope I never have to use iTunes again.

I might try to fix my iPod again, but this time I think I’m going to try this method. It just might work:

Haven’t blogged for a while. That’s partly because the home computer’s had a bit of downtime. I reinstalled Windows XP because it was acting strange. Things like burning a CD would fail, then work fine the second time. Jerky performance in games. Slow shutdown time and the occasional random error.
Time for a fresh start!
It was a lot less painful than in the past. I used nLite to make a custom Windows disc with all the latest service packs and updates, and drivers for all my hardware, so all I had to do was start the install and go read a book. When I came back a half-hour later, there was the desktop, sized to the correct resolution, connected to the Internet, and all ready to go. Awesome.
The hardest part was backing up my data so it was easy to restore. I backed up all my Firefox bookmarks, cookies, preferences and autocomplete stuff (I didn’t realize how much we rely on those things) and all my wife’s Thunderbird e-mails using a nifty program called MozBackup. But don’t use the latest version; use version 1.4.7 because 1.4.8 did not restore any of the e-mails, rendering it a pretty useless program. However, the older version worked flawlessly.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that reinstalling Steam into the same folder as before, where all the old data still resided, preserved all my old save games, data and preferences. Another advantage of dividing your hard drive into partitions – if you ever have to do a reinstall on the system partition, the impact on the other partitions is minimal. All my photos are in the same place, for example.
The only program that really gave me trouble was iTunes. I had to rebuild the entire library using a handy utility I can’t remember the name of right now (and I’m not posting from my home machine).
But once that was done, everything works great. It’s fast, stable, snappy and running in top shape.