Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Although I'm a fervent anti-Mac computer person since my days in college, i'm quite happy with my little iPod.  What I'm not so happy about though is the piece of junk software that you have to use with it called iTunes.  Last night I spent some time trying to sync up my iPod with several new playlist additions.  You know, it takes my valuable time away.  Looking at it this morning, the playlist and the songs I tried copying over didn't appear. What?!?!?!!?  I was really looking forward to checking out some of my new playlist, especially if I hit the gym.

Then a while back, I was using my laptop at work to recharge my iPod.  You see, the little wall charger's cable is too fucking small to connect to my iPod comfortably, so I just decided to go with the USB solution.  Because of the stupid DRM, iTunes constantly would ask me whether or not I wanted to ERASE my data and sync up with the current version.  If you leave the settings as is, this can be quite dangerous.  And guess, what?  Yup.  I accidentally hit the "ok" button.  There's no default setting that I can trust with this.  And you risk harming your disk if you accidentally do this and unplug the sucker.

Then we get to the crappy localization aspect.  Rather than smartly opening up the iTunes store globally, we have localized versions because we're geotagged.  What the hell?  I don't want a crappy localized version.  I read English!  That's why my settings on my desktop are set to English.  Instead, iTunes, in its infinitely retardation, makes all these assumptions FOR YOU.

I virtually never use iTunes at home as my default media player.  It's not good.  I just have a simple XMMS playlist which works great.  But I honestly just want to use iTunes to charge my iPod, create a few playlist and sync my songs.  However, the piece of shit can't even get those basics things done right.

As much respect as I have for Steve Jobs and what Apple has done with the iPod (in the form of the iTouch and iPhone), I can't believe that Jobs can say with a straight face that iTunes (or a lot of Apple's garbage) is truly the best media player out there.  It isn't.