I just upgraded to iTunes 7; I wish I hadn’t. Downloading fancy album cover is nice (though I wish I hadn’t had to give a credit card number to do so); the reflected images of the album covers are a bit much, but whatever. We’ll see how gapless playback works.
Unfortunately, it turns out that a certain piece of core functionality is broken: as far as I can tell, there is no way to tell it to automatically sync most podcasts with my iPod but to let me manually manage some of them. The previous mechanism that I’d been using for this (only sync checked episodes) has gone away. (The checkboxes themselves are still there; maybe the option will be restored in a future update?) The user interface lets me drag and drop episodes, which should also work just fine, but they don’t actually show up on the iPod.
So: buggy software. If it were free software, I’d probably be able to easily find some place I could get a definitive answer and/or file a bug; with Apple, there seems to be no way to do that. There do seem to be customer forums where I can whine; not clear that doing so will help, but who knows. I do hope there will be an update fixing this soon; if not, I guess I’ll look into free software for managing the beast.
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It turns out that it is possible to get to the state I want (manually manage music, sync checked podcasts). First, uncheck the “Manually manage music” box. Then, check the “Only sync checked items” box. Then, check “Manually manage music” (undoing step 1). Finally, go to the podcast page and tell it I want to sync all my podcasts after all.
I can live with having a single “only sync checked items” box that applies for both music and podcasts. But it’s stupid to have it greyed out if you’re manually managing music.
9/30/2006 @ 10:04 pm
[…] Having said that, my recent experience has made be a bit down on Apple. I’ve already complained about the latest iTunes version. The nano (at least the newest one, I can’t remember the old one) doesn’t work as well when scrolling through a long podcast description, for some reason. Worst of all, though, my new iPod was buggy. When first listening to it after syncing, it froze about half the time. Resetting cures the problem (toggle the hold switch back and forth, then hold down menu + center for a few seconds), after which it’s fine until the next time I sync, but it’s still broken. And there’s some haze under the screen – the case may be sturdier, but the screen still seems to have an issue. […]
12/10/2006 @ 6:26 pm
March 28 2007
The new itunes update is terrible. When you pause or even quit a movie or tv show that’s playing, the screen doesn’t disengage unless you quit itunes entirely. What a pain, I hope they fix it.
3/28/2007 @ 6:14 pm