First Experiences with my Ipod Touch

**This was a draft, originally written in August 2008**
I'm publishing it now because, even though it isn't done, it will never get any more done. So that makes it done ;)

So, my boss bought me an Ipod touch. Not sure if it is worth the extra hours I agreed to work or not (not all that many really, and I still get paid!).

The first thing I noticed was the unhappy request for iTunes. The device refused to turn on until it was connected to iTunes. Given that I regard iTunes with about as much as regard as an evangelical Christian in Kansas has for Barack Obama, this sort of upset me. Luckily, I was able to side step this by connecting it to my friend's mac. One second, and the device started working (no idea what it wanted).

Obviously being an internet junkie (and having heard people rave about Safari on the touch), I wanted to browse reddit. Unfortunately, our campus' wireless seems to have decided we don't deserve internet and is refusing to give anyone DHCP leases. Both my touch and my friend's mac happily accepted the DHCP fake IP (169.x.x.x). Of course, I fail at networking for not recognizing this...

The next step was to try it under linux. Hmm... looks like it still requires jailbreaking. Unfortunate; I won't be able to do that for a few months at least. I guess Apple really has the platform locked down.

So, my file server gets tarnished with iTunes. Oh well, it's got enough other crap on it already. iTunes didn't respond well when I set it's directory to my music folder, requiring that folder to be added manual afterwards. A minor annoyance.

Registration is of a pain; Apple's servers are really slow. And the tab navigation of the form is completely wrong... And apparently I can't do it without entering a credit card. I guess I'll do that if only because there is some music I have been meaning to buy, and the iTunes store might have DRM free versions.

iTunes seems to believe I want another copy of all of my album art. Not sure where it's going; there isn't all that much space on my OS partition so this might not end well. It also seems to dislike my wma music which is an opinion I share with it. No idea what it's transcoding to; m4a would be equally as useless.

I wonder how well iTunes can manage my xvid/VC9 encoded videos. Automatic transcoding to h264 for my device would be sweet... Tried to add a folder of .mkv, I think that confused it. Went to movies and selected open, this turned out to have been a poor decision. The UI went away and I can't figure out how to get back. No helpful back arrow. Oh, it's another window entirely (didn't see it pop up through the VNC session). Tried a folder of more normal files... It seems to have detected the mpg files at least. Not sure what it's doing. A quick google search suggests using handbreak to convert my files, so I guess I'm stuck doing it manually. I'm sure iTunes isn't exactly going to let me script in the handbreak cli either... Actaully, handbreak only seems to work for DVDs.

Next step: sync music. I have more than 8GB of music, so we'll see what iTunes decides to do when I request a sync. Hmm... it seems to have created an iPod playlist. It's initially populated as I would like: random albums. I wonder if it automatically changes each time I sync. It does not, which prevented me from changing my selection for a few months.

Eventually I sat down and spent about half an hour searching the net, and I discovered how to setup a new smart playlist... which is okay. It isn't smart about the albums like the original one, but that's probably my failure. I managed to delete the sync history, which I think will enable me to regenerate the original selection playlist and see what it did. What an odd button to have in preferences... Unfortunately, it didn't offer to setup the playlist again, so I'm stuck searching. After about half an hour more googling, I stumbled upon the 'select-by album' field, which does what I want.