Apple iPod Video 5th Generation Black (60 GB) MP3 Player

Get ready for a long one…

I bought this ipod thinking it would be the greatest thing ever... play video, pictures, and best of all, ALL of my music! It does all of these functions fairly well, and the battery life is very good (for music; for videos, you might as well bring the power cord... that you have to BUY seperately~~).

Sound on the ipod is very good too, with many different EQ settings enhancing the sound. I don't use the included classic earbuds becasue they never stay in my ears, but any headphones i plug up work well. I like how it automaticly pauses when you unplug the headphones, and it turns on (if hold is off) when you plug them in. The bass could be a little more pronounced, perhaps by a three-level megabass such as those on many Sony CD players. Overall, though, it sounds great.

Photo and video capability on the ipod is also great. The screen, i must say, is fantastic for such a small size. Videos play smoothely, although i have encountered slight hanging and sometimes, on full length movies (which are a TRICK to get on there~~), the lipsync becomes messed-up. Also, as i said, you can't watch many videos and/or pictures without the ipod drying up. However, don't expect to be able to easily put videos on... it can be quite the ordeal.

Playback on the ipod is fairly reliable. I have had the player lock up on me a few times, but it is a HD-based player, so this can almost be expected. Shuffle is extremely handy, although i wish the firmware would allow you to select what artists and/or genres were shuffled; sometimes i am not in the mood to hear rap, yet shuffle does not discriminate.

An improvement that is direly needed on the ipod (aside from itunes... we'll get to that in a moment~) is the way you find music. Especially on a 60gb model, where virtually zillions of songs under zillions of different artists are likely, it is very difficult to find the needed song in any moderate time frame (especially when looking for a specific song under "Songs" view). If you play the click wheel just right, it will zoom incredibly fast through the ABC-ordered songs, but it is VERY hard to get it to stop on the desired letter, much less song. Apple needs to update its firmware so that users can go directly to a letter in the alphabet, so that they don't have to scroll through ALL of the songs.

Some other things the ipod lacks is FM tuner/recorder and voice recorder. this is probably possible through some accessories, but i believe these should be givens for such a "great player". This brings me to my soapbox for ipod. My first erk is the lack of included power adapter. That is just sad. Apple is truly ripping-off America. Another turner-offer is the video-out capability. A great idea in theroy, but you can't easily do this. You have to BUY yet another accessory from Apple, a SEEMINGLY standard RCA cable. Regular RCA cables won't work. That really irritated me.

This brings me to the reasons for which i am selling the ipod. The lack of accessories i may have dealt with grudgingly. However, the hastle you have to go through to put songs ON The ipod and actually FIND them is rediculous. My first problem with itunes was the library itself. My music is on a seperate hard drive, so after importing all the songs into itunes (about an hour process, on a FAST computer), the next time i unplugged the hard drive itunes thought none of my music existed. Anger. It then preceded to do the "handy" auto-update of my ipod, thereby erasing over 2000 songs from my ipod to match the "empty" library. I was mad. Also, after i had corrected this problem, i made an attempt to delete all duplicate songs, which itunes has a handy feature which finds them. The only problem is, any songs that are remotely the same show up, and if you delete them (which i thought to be a good idea), i lost both the original copy and the duplicate song. There goes another few thousand songs from the ipod. AutoUpdate was promptly turned off.... Also, my music is organized via folders, and not all of the id3 tags are correct. To find them on the ipod, i have over 10,000 songs to go through and correct. Quite a pain.

FINALLY, when songs go onto the ipod, it renames the filename to a random 4-letter/number combination and sticks the songs into one of 50 random folders. VERY painful if you want to give a friend a few songs from the ipod, or want to put them on another computer (itunes won't let you bring songs from the ipod to your library. big surprise~). This heavily irritates me.

SOOO, even with the moderate plusses the player has to offer, i don't think it's worth the trouble of fighting Apple every time you want to put a song on, or take one off. The lack of features other players possess, such as the iAudio x5, also is a con. Finally, the extremely irritating software (itunes), lack of "drag-and-drop" capability, and no included accessories is just a simple turn-off. This is why the ipod got a 2-star rating from me; the benefits don't even closely outweigh the hasles that you have to go through. If you're not obsessive about being in control over your music, and how to actually FIND it, you may enjoy the very simplistic, limited-access ipod. However, for anyone else, I do not recommend.