|Absolute Value|

Apple, this is getting really old. iTunes is constantly losing podcasts. I plug my iPod in, and iTunes comes up and says “XXX was not copied to the iPod”. I check the podcast listings and the podcast has downloaded, but the file is missing (and iTunes doesn’t have a re-download option which to be honest is just plain stupid). Can I ever have this working properly on my PC? All I want is to plug in, sync and play. Last time I did an international flight, I knew I had about 20 podcasts lined up so I plugged the iPod in, left it for a few hours while packing, came back and unplugged and left for the airport. I sat in my seat, turned the iPod on and found…… most of the podcasts missing.

This is what iTunes is giving me on sync:

Anyone else seen this? Its getting pretty annoying:

***UPDATE***
Its a video card issue. And our friendly Dell technicians say its a software issue and I must now pay.

The countdown has started. What a grand prize:

“… if you’re the lucky grand-prize winner who downloads the billionth song from the iTunes Music Store, you’ll receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 60GB iPods, and a $10,000 iTunes Music Card to jumpstart your digital music collection. In addition, Apple will create a full-ride scholarship in your name to a world-renowned music school.”

With iTunes going to be supporting podcasts in it’s next version (4.9), iTuners (heh, I thought that one up all by myself ) will be able to browse directories such as iPodder.org as well as podcasts that have been registered by Apple themselves. This will really bring podcasting to the masses.

So as an editor to some nodes on the iPodder.org directory and iPodder.org being a decentralized structure, I host OPML files for the directory. Every hour or half-hour iPodder.org pulls my files, checks for updates and updates the directory if necessary. However, applications such as iPodder and most other podcasting applications allow their users to browse the directory directly, which means that whenever a user opens their podcasting client and browses to the nodes I manage, I take a bandwidth hit.

My concerns revolve around whether iTunes will be doing the same. If iTunes allows users to browse directories directly will the browsing take place on their servers with a periodically updated offline copy or will it be a real time browse? I seriously hope that they will host an offline copy of the directories or the day iTunes releases; I will unfortunately have to stop hosting my nodes.

As iTunes 4.9 must be close to completion, they must have done some testing. Therefore some traffic is going to have taken place against my server by iTunes. So a quick look in my access_log reveals this:

17.201.36.13 - - [23/Jun/2005:10:35:04 +0000] “GET /opml/technology.opml HTTP/1.1″ 200 12677 “-” “iTunes/4.9 (Macintosh; N; PPC)”

As you can see, iTunes 4.9 is requesting the files. There are multiple entries going back some time and disturbingly, the entries are from different IP addresses and different IP address ranges. This does not make me feel too happy.

Is there anyone who can confirm how iTunes will be browsing the directories?

So its official. My iPod is sold. Ebay is now my best friend. My reserve price on the auction was £150 and thats what I got. I sold my iPod, remote control, 2 pairs of Apple earphones and a protective case.

Now once the payment comes through PayPal, I will be purchasing one of these babies. A Creative Zen Micro (black one of course). I bought one for Sarah for Christmas and I love them. Build in FM tuner, microphone, 5 gig of space and a 12 hour battery life, it kicks the iPod into touch. The menu interface is nice and intuitive and the touch sensitive buttons are great and USB2 in the mix.

I will be a bit sad to see the iPod go because it is a beautiful piece of hardware. No mp3 player can beat it for looks but its battery life and the fact that you can only use iTunes to put music on it pull it down completely. The one other extremely annoying glitch is that if your ID3 tags are missing from the music, the iPod doesn’t categorize them, not even under “UNKNOWN” or anything like that.

With hindsight, I should have but the auction on this site when I first submitted as I could have leveraged my huge readership to publicize my iPod and get the bidding up! Yeah, right.