Drinking the Apple Kool-Aid
Monday, October 13th, 2008 | Technology
Well, I’m now the owner of one of those new, darn-fangled iPod Classics with 120 GB. I must say, it’s a fine looking piece of machinery and I have a beautiful dark-brown and orange leather pouch for it as well. It looks great. Haven’t been able to use it yet, though. And there’s a reason why: I can’t easily get my music onto it. 
The tricky part is the extreme lock-in by Apple which you only tend to discover afterwards and especially if you happen to be running Linux! Here are some poor actions and decisions on Apple’s part designed to lock you in, as well as some of the obstacles an awesome Linux user like me has encountered:
- An iPod registers itself as external USB storage when I plug it into the machine. Great. However, you can’t just copy your music files over. I have all my CDs saved in FLAC format on a file server with ID3 tags embedded. I was really just assuming that I could convert them to something more supported (MP3 or AAC or Apple’s Lossless aka ALAC) and copy them across. However, the iPod keeps all the music within a proprietary database format and you need specialized open-source applications which have reverse engineered the format to copy them in.
- I like my open-source applications lean and mean. (I run Gentoo. I’m weird that way). The open-source applications available aren’t too lean and mean at all. I’m still trying them all out, one at a time, until I find one that a) works and b) is easy to use.
- iTunes only runs on Windows and Mac. This is a huge problem, as far as I’m concerned because the authority on Apple formats and their own proprietary stuff is Apple themselves. Because they don’t support Linux, the support you can find on a Linux platform is all reverse engineered and not up to date. So, to do an iPod justice and get it working out the box, you kinda need iTunes here. Unless you’re willing to experiment with the open-source software mentioned above.
- The iTunes store for South Africa doesn’t have any music! What the heck?
- I imported several common CDs of mine into iTunes and the cover art wasn’t loaded even though I asked nicely. Bah humbug. What’s the point of the pretty screen without cover art? I think this may have to do with the fact that iTunes SA doesn’t have the music in the first place.
Uh.. and that’s all. It’s a very pretty device. It would have been amazing if they didn’t lock it down the way they have. I’ll let you know what I find out about the open-source products.
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