iPOD woes

I finally got myself to do something with the iPOD. I first plugged it in my Mac and transferred mp3 collection without too much of hiccups. Some mp3 files missed id tags, so they ended up in a huge unknown (or something similar) category. I didn’t have energy to go through them and so I uploaded only the correctly categorised files.

This was good and sweet. I also configured the gadget to be an external disk drive and managed to store a few documents there without problems.

A few days later, I tried to do the same on my Sony laptop. I installed the iPOD software, rebooted the machine, and connected the gadget. The software promptly told me to format iPOD in order to use with Windows. Of course, I didn’t like the idea and surfed the web for some time to find a solution.

The first FAQs were not very encouraging. Even Apple confirmed that iPOD may be used with either Windows or Mac. But not both. After more searches (I can be quite stubborn when solving these issues), I found information about XPlay. Downloaded a free trial and all the problems are solved for a couple of weeks.

But I have to use the gadget with three PCs and one Mac. I really don’t want to pay 3 x $29.95 to get it working in all of them. Some sources say that I could format iPOD with PC to FAT32 and use it also with Mac. Maybe I have to try it…

I could copy a few files to the gadget with the help of XPlay, but their filenames were truncated! Is this a problem on HFS or XPlay? Sounds so early 90’s to me.

And as the topping of the cake, I today listened music while riding my bike to work and back. During the trip, I had to lower down the volume. You have to use gloves while biking during Finnish winter. And the black leather gloves left marks to the scrollwheel! Fortunately I could rub the marks later off, but boy I was scared that I just ruined the outlook of my brand spanking new techie dream…

I’m reluctantly accepting that I have to read the fine print every single time I’m going to buy something from Apple. First issues with NTFS and now this. What would be the next obstacle? Any bright guesses?