As usual I’ve not posted anything for about a month now, so thought it was about time I posted something.
It’s been about 9 months since I stepped into the 21st century and got myself an iPod
It took a lot longer than I thought it would to get all my music digitised, but pretty much 99% of it is done. Have still got a few albums that are problematic, a few archives of mp3s kicking around but I don’t expect it to increase much more than the 25.1 days of listening time I have already.

Back to the iPod.
First and foremost, for those that don’t know I got the 80Gb Video iPod back in September 2006 while I was in New York. With the exchange rate it was stupidly cheap.

It makes going on holiday so much easier, because it had got to the point where I was taking 100 CDs with me which takes up a lot of space in hand luggage, and I always hated not having the covers with me to tell what tracks were.
An ipod fits in your pocket and holds my entire music collection which is amazing.
I’ve also started listening to albums I’d forgotten I owned and with smart playlists i can choose my favourites and with normal playlists i’ve created some good mixes of tracks which in the past I did with mix cds.
Overall it is truly brilliant and I can’t imagine being without it

On the downside, I’ve found I don’t listen to whole albums these days, as I am able to flick between tracks, listen to playlists or shuffle tracks
I do like the ratings ability, though I find that I don’t have time to rate all tracks, and my rating is inconsistent depending on the day.

I’ve found a glitch or two, there are features I find annoying, and there are features that I wish you could have

Glitches:
1.If you play a track through a playlist, then go into the list by album and select the same track it will restart the track from the beginning instead of selecting it
2. If you rate a track on the iPod and iTunes it will take the iTunes rating in preference to the iPod one next time you sync it – not really a glitch, but would be nice if you could choose.

Annoying features:
1. I have quite a few music videos i’ve transferred onto my iPod (i have about 120Gb on DVD which wouldn’t fit on the iPod, so have picked a select few). The music videos subsection of videos acts like a playlist in that if you go into an artist with more than one video, when it finishes it will move straight onto the next video. Compared with the movies section which will bring you straight back to the movie list
2. Podcasts: I like podcasts and have quite a few but find it difficult to listen to them because as soon as you finish playing an episode it takes you back to the main menu – stupid

Features I’d wish for:
1. Four buttons along the bottom of the screen. These would let you get additional info on the track being played. Currently the only info you can view on the iPod are Artist, Track, Album, Rating. What about all the others. You can browse by genre but can’t view the genre while playing.
2. If you are playing a track I’d like to be able to drop into a menu which would take you straight to the album you’re playing and play other tracks from that album or by that artist
3. Creating playlists – you can create on the go playlists which are good, but limited. Why restrict it to that when you can clearly create them from the iPod. Creating smart playlists from the iPod would be really useful.
4. The one i’d really like is the ability to create more sub sections to videos. You get Movies, Music Videos and Video Podcasts. I have been copying lots of videos from youtube and would like to sort them by category.
5. Similar to 4, a category section for video podcasts, I’m currently using the comments field and smart playlists to do this but it’s not ideal, as every time there’s a new file in a podcast you have to add the comments to this file.

I think that pretty much covers things, and I hope that apple will continue to upgrade their non-phone iPod with features in addition to their capacity increases.