Vista - iPod Killer? 557
JMB wrote us with a dire warning, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News. Apple is cautioning its Windows-using iTunes customers to steer clear of Vista until the next iTunes update. The reason for this is a bit puzzling. Apparently, if you try to 'safely remove' your iPod from a Vista-installed PC, there's a chance you may corrupt the little music player. They also claim that songs may not play, and contacts may not sync with the device. Apple went so far as to release a detailed support document on the subject, which assures users that a new Vista-compatible version of the software will be available in a few weeks. Is this just some very creative FUD? If it is not who do you think is 'at fault' here, Microsoft or Apple?
Re:Who to blame? (Score:5, Informative)
I use iTunes on Vista (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who to blame? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Who to blame? (Score:5, Informative)
It's like ejecting a floppy on a Mac or *NIX except there is another layer of software that has to properly write to the device to close it. Windows has no idea that iTunes has not finished and using Windows to eject hardware will close the device without all the updates from iTunes. I suprised that is any diffrent from XP or 2K.
does anyone out there ever press that "safely remove hardware" thing anyway?
You may get by most of the time if you don't have any applications such as a file browser open and was writing files that might be cached and not written. For example having a bunch of MP3's on a flash drive and unplugging it is not a problem most of the time. If you were writing new files and updating some files, such as a spreadsheet, may corrupt it if you don't close the application and use the eject option. Cached data might not all get written.
I don't understand why this is just an issue with iTunes and Vista. Maybe iTunes hooks into Safely Remove Hardware, and closes out writes before letting Windows confirm it's safe to remove the device. This is probably what's broken in Vista.
Re:Who to blame? (Score:3, Informative)
It has caching off by default for devices that show up in the removable media section (flash-drives) but on for things that show up in the Hard Disk Drives section (USB Hard-drives).
I have had stuff "corrupt" on a few occasions, but chkdisk fixed it every time.
Ethernet cards stay on... (Score:5, Informative)
In a semi-related note, presumably due the the firmware on the buggers, I've had problems where booting to a boot CD broke the Ethernet card, too (because the boot CD's drivers downloaded newer firmware, I think). Then when I booted back into the original OS, the card wouldn't work until I updated the machine's Windows drivers. This was with a Broadcom 10/100 integrated Ethernet card, BTW.
Re:Who to blame? (Score:2, Informative)
It's either laziness or, more likely, cost cutting that makes the iPod is so fragile. After all, Apple did design the new laptops with magnetic clips for the power cable - presumably because they get tripped over, knocked out etc.
Re:Studios should object to Apple DRM (Score:3, Informative)
You can burn CDs of DRMed music with the Zune software.
Re:It's apples fault (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting... (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like FAT32 (Score:3, Informative)
It sounds almost like the fragile FAT32 format that iPods for Windows uses. The iPod driver dealie may not be able to properly close the files and ejecting them could cause the filesystem to get corrupted. At least, that's my opinion after seeing how easily the FAT32 format gets corrupted. NTFS/HFS+, FTW!
Re:It's apples fault (Score:4, Informative)
That is how Linux reports memory usage (in 'free', for example). But Windows has never done so, at least not Windows 95 til XP. Used RAM was RAM used by applications, not caching. However, perhaps Vista changes this, I don't know - never used it.
Re:It's apples fault (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's apples fault (Score:5, Informative)
You're generally better off letting itunes handle it though, as it does a much better job. Now if only I liked itunes enough to use it for anything other than an interface to my ipod.. (or foo_dop would become stable enough and featurefilled enough to trust it with my ipod)
Re:Who to blame? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Because things should work. iTunes = Vista kill (Score:4, Informative)
With Linux, not only is there not a stable driver ABI, there isn't a stable driver API. Drivers from one kernel version are not guaranteed to be even source-compatible with the next. If it's a popular driver and is in the tree, it will be tested before a release and updated to use the new API. If it's not common hardware, and the maintainer is bored then it will just bit-rot and stop working eventually.
The kernel APIs don't change every minor revision, so you can usually compile drivers from the last version, but not always. The ABI changes quite frequently, so you may well need to recompile them. For most Linux users, this is not a problem since all of the drivers they use are in the tree and well-maintained, and the few that are out of tree are typically fixed up by their distribution so they never have to worry about it.
Given the liberal use of 'M$' in the grandparent post, however, I would expect that the author is probably about 14 and has just discovered Linux.
Re:It's apples fault (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.mlipod.com/
Re:Suits suits suits. (Score:3, Informative)
Huge difference there. Firstly, Apple never advertised iTunes as being Vista-ready. In fact, they stated the opposite. NVidia loudly proclaimed it, as part of their advertising strategy.
But more importantly, in the NVidia thread, people were not so much pissed off that there was a problem with the drivers - but that NVidia was offering no recourse for the customers, and was actually censoring customers and deleting their accounts when they complained about the bug. Apple is not trying to silence people who report a bug with iTunes on Vista, and is dealing with the issue frankly. Meanwhile, NVidia is stonewalling and being arrogant. That's why these two cases get different reactions. If Apple was acting like NVidia, they would rightly be lambasted by slashdot.
Re:It's apples fault (Score:5, Informative)
Re:End User's Fault (Score:5, Informative)
someone mod this up for "the peoples". I've hunted for something other then Apple's filename switching firmware for a while now. Easy drag and drop songs and delete/rename them from the ipod. There are even themes to make the ipod look like winamp or other skins from users.
rock box is like firefox for yer Ipod. Open code wins again!
Re:It's apples fault (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's apples fault (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's apples fault (Score:3, Informative)
"It's basically like two seperate partitions on the iPod, where the iPod can only use one, and Windows can only use the other."
the ipod's data & itunes transfered content all exist on the same partition. Itunes hides & obfuscates the songs so that the average user won't find them. All you music is inside the hidden folder "ipod control" (IIRC) and then the songs are give cryptic filenames and randomly distributed in folders which also have cryptic names. Getting the music off your ipod is as simple as drag & dropping those folders into your music collection. The problem with that is you now have messed up file names, so you would need a program like the Godfather to rebuild the filenames/folder structure from the mp3/aac tags. Another solution is to use the latest version of Winamp which has ipod support "out of the box" so you could also upload music to your ipod and download music back to your (or a friend's) computer.
Like I said, however, the simple workaround is just to put your friend's music folder onto your iPod as data, then copy it into your iTunes and put it right back on your iPod. It's just annoying"
Annoying is a common issue with itunes, but that's a rant for another thread. Winamp will allow you to load music freely at your buddy's computer. The downside is that iTunes will get pissy and trash all the music on your ipod if another program has uploaded music, the next time you try to sync with iTunes.
Also, if the iPod simply treated songs as files, the device would always be a backup of your library, in case something happens to your hard drive.
Again.. they are simple files, (see above), you just have to undo the obfuscating of folder/filenames that iTunes does as a small annoyance to deter piracy
Re:It's apples fault (Score:5, Informative)
I can't stand to use anything but Winamp! Well, that's not true, but I won't go anywhere near the limited functionality that is iTunes. No ogg vorbis support out of the box, etc.
there is a plugin that allows it to sync with the iPod
The newest versions of winamp5 include an updated version of this plug-in by default.
Another great reason to use winamp5 with your ipod is that it'll transcode songs that the ipod firmware can't handle for you. (yes I know it's bad.. but I don't notice the difference when I'm jogging) So all those wma's & ogg vorbis files will at least be playable on your yet again limiting apple ipod.
if you really wanted to make your ipod useful, you should check out rockbox.org
Re:Ethernet cards stay on... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's apples fault (Score:3, Informative)
Actually thats exactly what Vista is doing. It's called SuperFetch You can read more about it here: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vis ta-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/page2.html#su perfetch_the_uumlbercache [tomshardware.com]
I've been using Vista at home for a week now and the result of Vista caching is that applications load much faster than on XP, provided you have at least 1GB of ram.
Re:It's apples fault (Score:5, Informative)
Task manager never was and still isn't an accurate picture of physical memory in use. It's total combined address space, it duplicates the counts for standard system dlls, it counts stacks that are reserved but not committed - and among other things microsoft significantly increased the default (reserved) stack size for every thread of every process in Vista to decrease the incidence of stack overflow problems in applications. This doesn't cost any "real" memory, though it does cost address space within a process. Processes which may actually run out of address space on a 32-bit machine (like server apps) typically specify the stack sizes they want, and they are lower than the OS default. Server apps are rapidly moving to 64-bit anyway where this is a non-issue (for now).
Now, Vista *does* consume significantly more memory than XP at idle, and certainly needs more memory to run well - but it's not using 544mb without any apps running and, remarkably, it is extremely difficult to answer the question "how much memory is in use" in part because that question isn't specific enough to give an answer.
- Pages in memory?
- Does cache count (windows uses *everything* left as a cache, and in Vista it proactively fills that cache before you even run apps based on your page-usage-history, that is, what apps you tend to run though vista is not considering "applications" here but rather a much more generic concept of image-backed pages)
- Does it count if it's been written to the page file but is still in memory as well (like most OS's, windows proactively writes out private pages to the pagefile before it really needs to so that it can free physical memory quickly when needed - this also helps the system reach hybrid sleep state faster)
- Does it count if it's image-backed (sharable)? What if it's still in memory? What if it was never read into memory or was read into memory at process start and will never be touched again, thrown away as soon as memory pressure reqires it?
There is no easy answer other than "add memory until it performs well" and for Vista that seems to be a minnimum of 1GB, depending on the system, more "real" graphics card memory lowers the requirement, slower hard drives (and thus greater need for caching) increase the requirement.
Re:It's apples fault (Score:3, Informative)
Now if you want to get the files from an iPod onto a Mac thats another story. They get hidden easily, but many apps out there can help you get the files off eaisily like iPodDisk.
Novell - lousy comparison (Score:2, Informative)
If Microsoft doesn't relax how they're letting developers hook in for login and authentication (or add a significant amount of flexibility), a lot of third-party vendors implementing authentication or security mechanisms are going to have a lot of problems.
iTunes is "just" an end-user application, and the iPod just a device. There could be a change in behavior in Vista that causes a communications problem that can lead to problems. Of course, the Zune doesn't work yet with Vista either, so it's not too shocking Apple is having problems. I'm just surprised that they're not out in front of it more - it's revenue. Anyone who is getting a new computer with Vista is likely to postpone purchases from iTunes for a while.
Re:dog bites own tail? (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft probably owns a few hundred Macintoshes.
I have never heard that Microsoft has ever owned any part of McIntosh Labs, maker of fine audio equipment, and anyway, McIntosh Labs has nothing to do with iTunes, iPod or Apple Inc.
Microsoft does not own any part of Apple Inc., formerly Apple Computer Inc.
Re:It's apples fault (Score:3, Informative)
The reason that you don't just have drag-and-drop is for performance; a database is much faster than reading every file.
Re:Who to blame? (Score:2, Informative)
Apple could always have used another filesystem with a tiy fat32 partition to store windows drivers if they really wanted it to be accessible as a filesystem too.
And though the apple fanboys have modded my original post down, I'm not anti apple. I've bought an iPod a Mac Mini and a MacBook in the past twelve months. Not being anti apple does not, much as some would like to think, remove my right to criticise design decisions where there are faults.
Re:It's apples fault (Score:4, Informative)
If only that were true. Go ahead and let me know how to use itunes to handle this:
I have a collection of files in ogg format. I want to download them to my iPod. I realize that an ogg->aac conversion will lose some quality, but we can bump up the bitrate a little to compensate. Tell me how to do that with itunes.
I couldn't find any way to do it. I ended up batch-converting the files on my linux box, and then uploading them. Then when I deleted all the aac files that I no longer needed itunes was helpful enough to go ahead and delete them off the ipod on the next sync. Apparently I'd need to keep a whole set of aac junk files lying around just to keep itunes happy even though I'd never listen to them on a PC.
And yes, I did find a plugin that plays ogg in itunes - pity that it won't do a conversion when uploading to an ipod.
Suffice it to say the ipod was returned. It was actually a friend's device and not mine - I had advised against it all along figuring it would be a pain to get working...
I love my iAudio G3 - just copy files and it works. If for whatever reason I have to convert a file to upload it I don't need to keep the converted file on my hard drive. And I don't need any fancy software - works on any OS out there that handles USB drives...
Re:It's apples fault (Score:3, Informative)
Since my iPod has never, ever in its life seen any files with DRM, it can't be part of any "DRM scheme".
Even if your narrow definition of DRM is accepted, I think everyone on Slashdot knows what he/she was talking about. Apple is limiting functionality to allay the fears of copyright owners. Your files without DRM can still be restricted by a "DRM scheme" if you use iTunes.
Re:precisely (Score:3, Informative)
An FYI, Audible has their own software, so you don't have to use iTunes, and they also have a plugin for Windows Media Player. Audible is far older than iTunes, and works quite well with WMP or their own software and any MP3 player that doesn't have an Apple Logo on it. You can even stream your books from Audible directly from the internet via WMP and your Browser.
Also doing an OS upgrade kills your activations with Audible, so you have to reactivate if when you upgrade your OS. This has been a thing going all the way back to when I was in the WinXP beta and would forget to deactivate my player between beta build updates.
However, if you have exceeded your 3 activations, just go to their support page, and email them, telling them you upgraded your OS, lost your HD, your dog ate your homework, anything actually, and they will reset them.
They have reset my activations numerous times over the years, and I have even emailed them at 1 am, and got a real person email response with my activations reset within a few minutes.
Audible is a top notch company, even though they have to heavily use DRM to control the audio book content. (And no, I have nothing to do with Audible, nor any investment; I just like their service, with almost 200 books in my Audible library.)
Needless to say Audible's software and their WMP plugin work flawlessly with Vista; you won't be able to load your iPod, but you can at least listen to them or load them on another MP3 player. I recommend a Creative Zen, nice little units and you can buy songs from companies other than Apple.
Of course, apparently Audible noticed that Vista was being released Jan 07, like every other company in the world in the long delay for Vista, which is unlike Apple that still can't get iTunes to work properly on a product people have been waiting on for 6 years.
Maybe MS should have given Apple a 10 year notice about Vista, so Apple would of had time to make a software product that worked properly. Wait, even their OSX version sucks, let alone the buggy XP version.
But I guess it helps Apple to say, aw, our crap software doesn't work on Vista, so don't buy Vista.
(I would buy an iPod, but then I would have to use iTunes, and sadly I like the choice of software players and choice of music stores. I guess I'm just old fashioned in not going for the Orwell 1984 concept of who controls my songs and what I listen to them on and where I buy them.)
Good luck with your books...
Re:It's apples fault (Score:1, Informative)
As for the 'pod wiping itself on a resync with those AAC files gone... did you clear the sync ipod on connection option & clicked manual, cause that'd kept 'em.
Re:precisely (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's apples fault (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's apples fault (Score:3, Informative)
Gosh - I'd have been happy if it just didn't delete all my files whenever I synced it after deleting the originals on my hard drive. I can easily bulk-convert ogg to aac/lossless/whatever - but I'd rather not keep those files around just so that itunes doesn't just delete them.
Re:It's apples fault (Score:3, Informative)
No, but it could be an SBP-2 device.
Ok, quick iPod lesson. The first iPods out the door were firewire only, and act as an SBP-2 device. You plugged them in, iTunes would see the iPod hard drive and load music onto it. If you enabled disk use via iTunes, the Finder would stop hiding the drive when it was connected, and not automatically disconnect the device when a sync was complete. Then the iPod also shipped as a Windows version. What was the difference? The hard drive was formatted FAT32 instead of HFS, so Windows computers could see it. Same trick, iTunes would see the device when connected, sync, then disconnect unless disk use was enabled.
Then one day Apple shipped devices that had a "dock" port on them instead of a standard 6 pin firewire connector. This new dock port supported both USB2 and Firewire, and the firewire continued to be a standard SBP-2 device. The USB, well it turns out it is a standard USB Mass Storage device. And iTunes kept doing the same thing, it would see an iPod, sync, then disconnect when it was done unless disk use was enabled.
Now, iPods ship with USB2 support only. They know when they are connected via firewire and alert you on the iPod screen that the device is only going to charge via firewire and not sync. So all current iPods are USB mass storage only.
As other people have explained, the iPod reads music out of a hidden folder, where all songs are stored with the 4 character names and info is in a database allowing for quicker access. iPods, and all MP3 players have slow processors when compared to PCs, so having a single database to access ends up being a lot quicker then parsing out every file. True, the iPod could theoretically build it's own database, but the process would be slow. The old empeg-car does this, and when it came out the 200mhz ARM processor didn't seem too bad to build a database for 6 or so gigs of music. But now with people sticking 2 160gb drives in, the database updates can be painfully slow. The Rio Karma allowed either the device to rebuild the database, or the computer to do it, but never supported USB mass storage. In a perfect world, a device would always use a database, generated either on a PC for those that don't worry about software loading their music, or on the device for people that do, and everyone would be happy.
For me, I just want a device that lets me build my own hierarchical playlists, and doesn't have a crappy UI. MP3 playback is the only codec I need, since that is still the codec to choose if you want to play music on any device. If I had the hard drive space, I'd rip my collection to FLAC, and use a Samba VFS plugin to encode into format X on the fly.