iPod Syndrome
Posted by TimothyFeb 19
Now that I’ve owned an iPod for over a year, I have this sort of strange phenomenon I’m going to term iPod syndrome. In the first place, I have a small capacity iPod, so this probably affects those people more than those with 20+GB iPods. When you’re under the 16GB limit I’d guess that you’re like me, and have to manage your playlists really well for the day. However, if you’re exactly like me, you’re REALLY lazy and just have a 4+ star playlist and maybe a customized playlist. Over the course of several months it ends up that you sort of become sick of these songs which are in fact your most favorite or at least highly rated of songs.
The problem with the small size limit (for me 8GB) is that not all of my 4+ star rated songs fit onto the iPod. So I have it set to random select. There’s a lot of different ways to select your size limit, but the real problem is I use my iPod more than I use iTunes and iTunes is what actually updates song information like last played and skip count etc.. This seems really idiotic since the iPod should basically be running miniature iTunes and should be updating the songs and syncing back with my desktop but it doesn’t appear to be.
So what happens is I get really bored with my music and new songs really drive me to listening. But what does this really mean? It means that iTunes is the platform to leverage buying new songs! It’s a horrific cycle! I mean there are alternatives to iTunes sure. But it’s interesting how this can affect me as a small capacity user. If I had my full library I might not be as affected because the combination of genius+full library might not get me as bored as fast with my music.
Ok secondary to the boredom with music, I picked up a second gen iPod Touch and man, they are so sweet. Mine is a great slim little brick, but they somehow trimmed them down even more to a blade shape. I kind of really want to get a 32GB touch now but ah well.
Incidentally, I have a really peculiar syncing problem. I can’t do autosync anymore because it adds playlists I don’t want synced. I’ve weakly searched the support forums but I don’t think anyone else has this problem. It’s so weird. I wonder if I do a full format if that would fix it up, but I’m not sure how it stores my contacts since I have added some unique ones in not in Outlook/Google. This reminds me that I have been meaning to move everything to Google in the event that I one day do get an Android phone.
