[uraflit]

the ipod has taken over... ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

CAN ANYONE STOP THEM? AHHHHHHHHH

 

[younglee200]

I don't really care about Ipod taking over... Apple deserves it imo.

But the ibuds taking over hurts me a bit, especially when I'm riding bart or bus.

 

[andare]

This is what iPods have:

complete user experience, from the look and feel of the item to the seamless integration with the software that manages it and the store that provides content for it.

design consistency of both hardware, formware, software, promotional material, message it gets to the potential customers

a relaxing, pampering environment totally controlled by Apple which leaves no room for overlapping apps, malware, extra configuration needed, too many choices

notice this:

Apple makes a dap. Which software manages it? Itunes, the default media manager in Apple's OS

Microsoft makes a dap. Which software manages it? Zune application, NOT WMP. Why? (I understand you cal ALSO manage a Zune w/WMP though)

Also the click wheel is the only physical control that allows continual scrolling with ONE FINGER gesture. Every other dap has up down multiple buttons

Look at the iPhone/iTouch icons: all rounded squares, colorful but schematic pictograms immediately tell you what they do, look good together, arranged in a grid on a black background

Now look at Android: pseudo 3d icons, they all look different, have variously jagged edges, inconsistent arrangement over a tropical island wallpaper.

Which one is easier to read and which one is easier to expand?

These little details make all the difference in the world.

Of course people will always buy other daps also but Apple is decades ahead (multi-touch= new way of interacting with software, accelerometer = new gaming experience)

INNOVATION no one else cares about until they are force to because Apple implemented (not invented) it first

(Apple first introduce USB , firewire, widescreen laptops to the market, everybody follows suit every time)

Chapeau Apple!

 

[Ingen]

Work for the Apple Inc. marketing department, andare? If not, maybe you should apply for a job. They might turn you down for too much bias though.

"seamless integration with the software that manages it"

And seamlessly trying to ram a program down people's throats rather than allowing drag and drop.

"a relaxing, pampering environment totally controlled by Apple which leaves no room for overlapping apps, malware, extra configuration needed, too many choices"

Indeed, god forbid the user is trusted to make a decision. Daddy, I mean, Steve knows better than those kids anyway..? Personally, I like having the freedom to not have my preferred programs locked out because they happen to compete with an Apple product.

iTunes can manage an iPod, and WMP can manage a Zune. So what, both are poor choices compared to a more open approach and/or drag&drop.

As for continuous scrolling with a click-wheel, I've never been impressed by that. Apparently that goes for a fair few others, as iPod has since released touch and shuffle.

Regarding the iPhone vs Android, I am not sure what you're on about. I can fairly easily tell that the gmail icon (red letter) with the text below it reading "Gmail" is linked in some manner to gmail. If you don't like their arrangement, move them. It seems you haven't researched it too well, look at this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePc6pSdn3vQ . It shows fairly early on how you can decide what icons you want (notice the drag and dropping of the IM program).

Change the wallpaper if it gets to you that much. It's open, thus you have far greater ability to change it to the way you like it than most other competitors (read blackberry, iphone, etc).

Does "easier to expand" mean software development? I am surprised someone thinks this will play to iphone's advantage after what they've done with the appstore.

That said, apple makes pretty products which are great if you like simplicity and good SQ. This of course comes at the price of choice, cost and Apple trying to lock you in at any opportunity, but hey, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

PS. In case anyone wants to accuse me of hating apple, let me clarify that I don't like nor dislike them any more than google or microsoft, and depending on how new products play out and prices change, might even get an apple product in the future. I do dislike entirely lopsided praise of anything though as it tends to be rather misleading.

 

[andare]

well my words sounded biased, sorry for that.

i was actually trying to make general remarks on why apple has more mass appeal than most other brands.

simplicity is the way to go if you want that because most people simply aren't skilled enough or bothered to customize, download, drag and drop...

you got a mac, itunes and and ipod: instant access to the most popular media at the tap of a finger. nobody at the moment can dream of beating that

this caters to the staggering majority of mainstream people enjoying mainstream media and makes the process of getting and listening to music much easier.

let's be reasonable, only a small percentage of the population:

- buys a (uhm let's say King Crimson) CD
- rips it with EAC to a lossless format
- drags and drops the FLAC files to a generic looking dap with cell phone like controls (think Sony AW828 and the likes which are similar to Sony Ericsson cell phones)
- connects a pair of UE11

most people:

- tap on iTunes Store on their exciting iPod touch
- download Justin Timberlake ft. Beyonce ft. Hanna Montana (...)
- actually listen to it through white earbuds

As far as I'm concerned, having been trained as architect and designer and working in graphics, I admire Apple because it seems to have the end user in mind when it designs products.

Shoving apps down your throat through sneaky installs, limiting choices are all commercial strategies.
Apple is not perfect and is a capitalist monster for sure but we have to hand it to them, without them the computer and dap world would be much bleaker.

I hope (so far in vain) someone combines Apple's innovation and design with freedom and open sourcedness, in the meantime thanks for all the choices the market gives us.

I'll now go back to my Win XP box, hoping nothing crashes today.

 

[andare]

Work for the Apple Inc. marketing department, andare? If not, maybe you should apply for a job. They might turn you down for too much bias though.

"seamless integration with the software that manages it"

And seamlessly trying to ram a program down people's throats rather than allowing drag and drop.

"a relaxing, pampering environment totally controlled by Apple which leaves no room for overlapping apps, malware, extra configuration needed, too many choices"
As for continuous scrolling with a click-wheel, I've never been impressed by that. Apparently that goes for a fair few others, as iPod has since released touch and shuffle.

this makes no sense as you don't scroll on the shuffle (it either plays in order or it duh shuffles) and the iTouch has a touch screen that you flick lists on

Does "easier to expand" mean software development? I am surprised someone thinks this will play to iphone's advantage after what they've done with the appstore.

i meant it's easier to expand a grid view and split it into a bunch of screens

 

[scompton]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ingen /img/forum/go_quote.gif And seamlessly trying to ram a program down people's throats rather than allowing drag and drop.

I see this comment a lot and every time, I my first thought is that the poster must have a tiny library. Drag and drop stopped working for me years ago. My library is just too big to easily find stuff without library management software. iTunes is the best I've found so far for managing a large library. Media Monkey comes close, and maybe if I spent a lot of time with it, I'd like it as much as iTunes. If you use library management software and drag and drop from it, this argument for using iTunes goes away. That's how I've used iTunes for the last 3 years since my library is too big for any portable player.

 

[Ingen]

I never really had any problem with the quantity of music, even when it is many times more than I can fit on my DAP. They're all named fairly straight forward, music -> artist -> album -> files with the song title as name, making finding anything fairly easy.

 

[cerbie]

Quote:

Originally Posted by scompton /img/forum/go_quote.gif I see this comment a lot and every time, I my first thought is that the poster must have a tiny library. Drag and drop stopped working for me years ago. My library is just too big to easily find stuff without library management software. iTunes is the best I've found so far for managing a large library. Media Monkey comes close, and maybe if I spent a lot of time with it, I'd like it as much as iTunes. If you use library management software and drag and drop from it, this argument for using iTunes goes away. That's how I've used iTunes for the last 3 years since my library is too big for any portable player.

My library was over 100x what my DAP could hold when I bought it, it's slowly getting bigger, and using a plain old file manager works fine. There are no scaling issues.

It's not about library size. It's about abstraction, and handling time. I know I want to fit a certain set of music recordings on my DAP. I know what they are, and I know the priority they should have (for getting down to which ones must be left out that day).
Quote:

My library is just too big to easily find stuff without library management software.

Needing to find anything is a foreign concept. I know what I have, I know about how big each album is, thus know about how big it will be once made lossy, and all of it is neatly organized. Organization and navigation by the metadata info is a layer of abstraction that I don't need or want, and I have the useful metadata integrated into the directory/file structure. I have no problem thinking, "Animals is at '~/mnt/music/Pink Floyd/1977 Animals/', and is about 45 minutes, so will come to about 80MB transcoded." Then I do it. P.S. It's about 42min/77MB, as it does happen to be on my aging I5 right now (fav PF album, as you might guess

).

 

[Zanth]

I'm with cerbie on how I would like to use my iPod. I have my media drives setup as he does. I have 3 1 TB drives now all setup to indicate 1) type of files 2) artist then 3) album It works perfectly and I can find everything super fast. When I have my PS3 navigating my server via fuppes, I see this:

Lossy --> A through Z --> A (example) All artists alphabetically ordered --> Animals (for instance) and then all albums

1 directory to 35 directories (I have a childrens, classical, jazz, various artists , opera, soundtracks and a few others to bump it from 26 to 35 or so).

Then under each one it's a simple deal finding what I need, actually must easier than using the navigational metadata format the iPod uses.

However, Ingen's response to andare was a pretty rough response. Nothing andare said was incorrect or hyper-fanboyish at all. Everything written is exactly the reason Apple completely dominates the DAP market. By dominating I pretty well mean own it outright. The few alternatives are barely a blip for most people. Yes there are features that us geeks would love but ultimately most don't know of these features or want them.

Alternate formatS? Most use mp3s. Drag and drop? Most want iTunes to do the work of organizing and/or transferring.

Slick system, sexy design, very very ergonomic, 1 action motions and a product that just works and works well most of the time and has stuck with a system without much change over nearly 10 years of product releases. Even the itouch functions quite similarly (though the idea of one motion actions is now gone

)

 

[heanukahn]

iriver and cowon

 

[scompton]

OK, here's something I did last night that I don't know how I would do easily without management software.

I have a subscription to the National Opera and I created a play list with everything I have on the following operas

1. Bizet - Carmen
2. Bizet - Pearl Fishers
3. Verdi - La Traviata
4. Britten - Peter Grimes
5. Pucinni - Turandot
6. Wagner - Siegfried

The versions of the Bizet operas I own are by obscure artists. Off the top of my head, I don't know the artists they are filed under. They'd be pretty hard to find. I also wanted any aria from one of these operas off of any compilation album, and only arias from these operas, not the entire compilation. This took me about 15 minutes in iTunes. It would have been even quicker if I didn't care about having a few extra tracks and did a smart playlist.

If you're not using library management software, how do you go about creating this type of playlist? I'm genuinely curious and not trying to be argumentative. This is something I do a few times a year and it's interesting to see other ways people do things.

 

[Ingen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zanth /img/forum/go_quote.gif Nothing andare said was incorrect or hyper-fanboyish at all. Everything written is exactly the reason Apple completely dominates the DAP market. By dominating I pretty well mean own it outright. The few alternatives are barely a blip for most people. Yes there are features that us geeks would love but ultimately most don't know of these features or want them.

You might want to look over the statement about android icons (furthermore I'm not quite sure why one would include an attack (incorrect or not) on a third party that hasn't entered market yet to explain why another product has sold well to date).

As for owning outright, I'd not use such strong words.. falling from 92 to 70-something and now approaching 80 again, I'd give them a dominant but not outright owning. I think this is further stressed by the fact they felt threatened enough by MS players to improve their performance/cost (they're in it for the money, would they do that if they didn't think they had to to protect profits?) within the matter of days?

 

[Ingen]

Scompton, I do have some albums listed under various artists. If more than one person has participated in an album, that's where it goes. I also have one album for each major provider of audiolectures (with further subdirectories for area), rather than them sorted under name of lecturers (which I would rarely, if ever, remember).

 

[cerbie]

Quote:

Originally Posted by scompton /img/forum/go_quote.gif If you're not using library management software, how do you go about creating this type of playlist? I'm genuinely curious and not trying to be argumentative. This is something I do a few times a year and it's interesting to see other ways people do things.

Opera/Author/performance info/
I'm not into Opera, but that's how orchestral and organ are (also a various artists and soundtracks as separate subdirs):
classical/composer/title and performance/
like
classical/Dvorak, Antonin/Symphony of the New World at wherever/

That's where the neatly organized part comes in. It takes a minute or two for one out of every 10 discs or so. I'm lazy, more often than not, though, in that the names are different enough I don't explicitly state it. FI:
classical/Dvorak, Antonin/Symphony of the New World at wherever/ (where I add the "at wherever" based on the CD case' info)
classical/Dvorak, Antonin/no. 9/ (it's different enough, I'm lazy, *shrug*)