It recently occurred to me that I despise and hate my 30 GB video iPod. I’ve had this thing for a little over a year now and it has never lived up to its potential. Between crashing and syncing problems I have just had enough! I’m now ready for something new.

Before I acquired my iPod I used a very poor MP3 player called the iRock. It only held 128MB of music and did not have any sort of stop/resume feature. It worked well enough for music but not for podcasting. If I listened 30 minutes into a 1 hour podcast and then turned it off it would not resume 30 minutes in, this did not work.

When I moved on to listening to podcasts during my morning and afternoon drive times I brought my laptop in my car and plugged it in through the tape deck. This worked but… It was a laptop! I didn’t want to lug that thing around with me all day (or leave it in my car) just for a little bit of podcast listening during drive time.

The iPod worked out great, at first. It allowed me resume listening to a long show right where I left off. It also had the ability to be used as an external storage device. Considering my laptop only has a 20GB drive in it the 30GB drive on the iPod was like having a back-up drive. Unfortunately, I soon encountered problems.

Because my laptop’s drive was not big enough to store all of the MP3 files I ripped from CDs I had to turn off the sync feature of the iPod. After copying songs over I would delete the ripped files from my computer. This worked well until the first time my iPod’s indexing file got corrupted. When that happened I had no choice but to reformat the iPod, losing all of my songs in the process. No, I never did rip them all again.

Later on I tried to update the iPod’s firmware but, in order to do that it wipes the entire iPod clean! That may work well if you copies of everything on your computer but I did not.

The real pain with the firmware updates is that they were forced on me.

I like to watch a particular anime video podcast and it has always worked on the iPod. Several months ago my iPod refused to let me transfer the files. It gave me some lame “your software is too old to view this file” message even though the producer of the content was using the same exact software to make the videos. So I upgraded… and more hell broke loose!

Suddenly play lists were gone and syncing only worked sometimes. Some files would sync and others would not. No amount of cajoling would allow me to move the files over except one method. That method involved dragging and dropping from outside of iTunes and after moving the file it would only appear in the recent area for a few days. It would not appear under music/podcasting/anything… This was a very annoying problem.

Eventually I wiped the whole thing clean and started fresh, this time I set it to auto-sync everything! This has worked well enough but, the other night I needed more hard drive space so I started deleting some of the MP3 songs on my laptop. I did not delete them via iTunes though, just the files themselves.

When I plugged in my iPod this morning to get my podcasts transferred over it erased all of my MP3 songs from my iPod before I could tell it to do otherwise! Why is that? It is like that because there is no way to tell iTunes how to interact with your iPod unless it is plugged in! Once it is plugged in it does its own thing until it feels like letting you do what you want to do. In the blink of an eye iTunes wiped my 10GB music collection…

I thought deleting the files but leaving them in the iTunes index would be OK, I guessed wrong. Some of those files I even paid money for via iTunes… they are all gone now. The only reason I still use the iPod is because I like to watch my iPod video podcasts on my TV with an A/V cable. You know what? It’s not worth it anymore. I have lost too much time fiddling with this horrible music player. I want something new. I want something that does not suck.

Can anyone direct me to a new portable media player that does not suck like the iPod does? Please?

PS: I tried using RockBox on the iPod at one time but it goes into charging mode if I plug in the charger while in the car.

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