Hi all,

It’s that time of the year again when I like to head off away from everyone in the UK for a bit of peace and quiet in Italy where we have a modest size appartment. We say it’s in Venice, and while technically it is, it’s not the place you’d stay if you were coming to Venice for a holiday. The block of appartments is on a natural island in the Venice lagoon called The Lido or more correctly Lido di Venezia.

It is technically larger than Venice itself and is home to approximately 20,000 people. The region we live in is called Malamocco. It is where the locals of the lido live, and parts of it are very rural. All the others in our block are italians, and while the majority of people speak english it isn’t brilliant, so one day we will need to speak italian decently. Travel to the main part of venice is a 20 minute bike ride/10 minute bus ride/a long walk followed by a half boat ride from the vaporetto station Santa Maria Elisabetta.

Anyway, that’s the background to the place.
On arriving here I’ve been listening to all the songs I’ve put on the ipod i bought in september. I now have about 7 days or 3000 songs on there and having spent a good few hours travelling by taxi, coach, plane, boat and car to get here along with plenty of time hanging around in the airport I’ve had a lot of time to come up with opinions on the ipod.

As you have no doubt realised, I’m a late commer to iPods for a number of reasons:

1. I always had a scepticism about them
2. There was something I liked about actually putting a cd in
3. I never wanted to commit the hard disk space to mp3s
4. Until recently there was something very irritating about iTunes, and I still secretly pine for Cassady & Greene’s SoundJam to return

I finally gave in when it became impractical to carry 300 cds (well, I used to bring 100 of them with me on holiday) around with me. And the price and size of the iPods just got too tempting to resist and I got the 80Gb 5th gen iPod Video.

As I said, I’ve got quite a lot of my music on there, but I’ve decided there are still a few things I would find really useful in an iPod:

• Viewing Song/Video Details on the iPod – currently you can only see the song name, artist and album. Other details such as year, genre, bitrate, track number etc are not visible. This is particularly useful for a TV series as the iPod simply orders everything alphabetically. If the name does not contain the episode number you’re stuffed!
• I’ve been playing with the rating system and gradually rating all my songs on the 1-5 scale. This will no doubt take as long or longer than it will take to import the remainder of my songs. But, it would be nice to view all songs that have not been rated to make this easier
• It would be good to be able to create playlists and modify ID3 tags of the tracks. The iPod can clearly do that as it can do the ratings. I do not have my mac with me on holiday, and would like to customise some of my smart playlists but cannot do that except through iTunes. If I plug my iPod into the computer I am writing this on it will more than likely wipe the contents of my iPod as it has tracks for my dad’s iPod. On the subject of customising the tags this is useful because CDDB/Gracenote can often get things wrong, especially with the more obscure albums and cover discs which are not often used. I could not find a way to submit a change to gracenote so when I do notice a mistake I have corrected it on iTunes but don’t always spot this
• I thought of a feature which I would find useful when in shuffle mode: to switch to the album/artist that has come up in shuffle mode
• Finally, an option to switch on/off the backlight at will and also to make it switch on at the start of each track. This would be particularly useful in shuffle mode.

I’ve also found a glitch which I guess isn’t too much of a glitch, but all the same isn’t quite right in the logic:

If you are playing a song in shuffle mode then browse for that same song through the artist/album/genre/search and choose it from there while the song is playing it will restart it from the beginning. This is not how iTunes works so should not be how the iPod works. It should not affect the songs playing and simply bring the song up as if you chose “now playing”.

Apart from that, I think this iPod is great. I’m going to struggle to fill the 80Gb with music alone at the moment, the battery life is good, and it makes transporting music much easier. I’ve been a latecomer to the iPod but I do like it and know what I want.

To all those who I don’t get a chance to see before the new year: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year