One of the less well-kept secrets around the Home Office leading up to Christmas was the “big gift” that I gave to my wife. I gave her a 10 Gigabyte iPod that I bought at the Apple Store at Menlo Park Mall in Edison, NJ. I probably would have bought the iPod from Amazon.com (what can I say– they’ve been good to me), but there were a couple of issues that kept me from doing so:
- Amazon had trouble keeping iPods in stock (although that situation is improving now).
- Apple offered human beings I could speak with about specific compatibility issues between my wife’s PC and the iPod.
What do I mean when I say “specific compatibility issues”? My wife’s computer is a 300 megahertz Pentium II running Windows 2000. At the time, it had USB 1.0 (not USB 2.0) ports. Up to now, this has been plenty of machine for our everyday computing tasks: it’s fine for Internet access and we’re not really PC gamers.
I spent days researching the practicality of docking an iPod to her computer. This involved gathering the operating requirements for a Belkin Five Port USB 2.0 PCI Card, making sure the PC’s BIOS was compatible with PCI 2.1, making sure a slot was available, buying the card, and performing the installation. This took a long time.
Despite all of this planning, I didn’t think of every issue that needed to be considered. Apple iTunes 4.2 for the PC requires a 500 mHz Pentium-class processor. The iPod box has PC system requirements, but the 500 mHz CPU requirement is not listed. The personnel at the Apple Store in Edison didn’t mention it either. The iTunes CDs that Apple is giving away at stores do not list the system requirements for either platform.
Of course, it’s not necessary to run iTunes to use an iPod with a PC. Since the official release of the iPod for Windows, it has been explicitly supported by MusicMatch Jukebox. I’ve been using MusicMatch for several years, because it supports my Rio 800, so I upgraded to MusicMatch Plus 8.2 and I thought we were set.
MusicMatch wouldn’t work for me. I checked the Windows service packs on my wife’s PC. I downloaded, installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled the iPod plugin for MusicMatch. The program never synced more than one playlist and most of the time, it did nothing. Then, I thought I was really stuck.
My salvation came from Ephpod. This is a freeware application for Windows and Linux that simply provides connectivity between an iPod and your music library, and some basic playlist management features.
My wife likes Ephpod because she wants to manage music on her iPod on a playlist-by-playlist basis (rather than syncing our entire music library which includes stuff by artists she doesn’t like). I like Ephpod because it is a no-nonsense application that does what it does quickly and simply. If you can’t run iTunes and you don’t like MusicMatch, with its emphasis on application skins and other trivia, you may prefer Ephpod.
The problem with Ephpod is it can’t be your complete music solution. You can’t buy music downloads with it, it doesn’t rip CDs, or manage a large MP3 library. I still use MusicMatch for that.
In spite of the Windows application software issues, I stand by the comments I’ve made about the iPod. It is a cultural phenomenon. It is the best large capacity MP3 player ever built, and the user interface of the unit itself is incredible.
Best of all, my wife loves the iPod. She is a big music fan and a musician herself. One of her big problems in life is that she doesn’t have a lot of time to spend on entertainment because she is in the second year of a pediatric residency program. The iPod is great choice for her because it lets her carry as much of her music collection with her as she wishes and to play it when and where she has time. In less than a week, this has added to her quality of life.
I’m not as much of a music fan as she is. I listen to much more spoken-word audio, things like Audible and books-on-tape. In spite of this, I find myself wanting an iPod. I would listen to music more often if I had my entire MP3 collection in a portable form. I probably will not buy one for myself, however, until I get a machine that runs Windows or OS X that fully supports iTunes; I would want to be able to use that service in order to buy specific songs that I like.