iPod Rebirth
Okay, we all knew it would happen, but just for the telling: yes, today on my lunch break I walked to London Drugs and bought the new iPod Classic 80GB. Black. (Because they didn't have silver, and I wasn't picky about colour anyway.)
It's been syncing to my library for nearly three hours now. Still a while to go.
The good news? There are a ton of not-very-well documented new features, so lots of surprises. The short list:
Browse by composer! Finally! I don't have all that much classical music, but even with the collection I do have, it's a pain to have to choose: Do I file this as J. S. Bach? Or as Christiane Jaccottet (harpsichord)? Especially where I have the same works recorded by multiple artists, this got really weird. They tweaked the scroll wheel sensitivity for the star ratings! I'm probably the only person on the planet who ever complained about this, but via the iPod I found it practically impossible to rate anything 4 stars. 5 was easy, just slam it to the right. And 3 was not so bad. But getting those in between ratings was like trying to balance a nickel on its edge. You can turn on/off the shuffle function from the song screen! Hooray! An even bigger peeve than the ratings. Now, the centre button clicks through the following screens for the currently playing song: Volume, Position, Rating, Shuffle off/songs/albums. I'm so happy about this.
So those were the peeves that I'm so glad are out of the way. Now for the icing on the cake:
The main menu has a context-sensitive picture section on the right half of the screen, which shows a taste of whatever setting you're on. Music, Videos, and Audiobooks give a Ken Burns' style slideshow of album covers. Settings shows your available disk capacity. Extras shows the clock. Nice. There's extra context everywhere. While browsing Genres, it gives the number of artists and albums for each. When browsing Albums, it shows the artist under each. Same for Songs. So helpful. Only downside is that each listing is now two lines long, so not so many on a page, but that's okay. Album art and rating are shown on the main playback pane. I never understood why this wasn't the case — the screen always had plenty of unused real estate. Cover flow browsing. It's neat looking but I don't really care about this. Some people seem to really like it though.
So I definitely give this one a thumbs up. Now let's see if I can not drop it.
It's been syncing to my library for nearly three hours now. Still a while to go.
The good news? There are a ton of not-very-well documented new features, so lots of surprises. The short list:
So those were the peeves that I'm so glad are out of the way. Now for the icing on the cake:
So I definitely give this one a thumbs up. Now let's see if I can not drop it.