beware ipod

I appreciate that most people seem to love their ipod but their is absolutely no excuse for the lack of quality control that I have encountered. As for their legendary "support"...the manual that comes with the ipod is an absolute joke...the dreaded folder with an exclamation mark icon that pops on the screen to tell you that you are hooped isn't even mentioned in the manual. Wading through apple's web site isn't much better. I called the 800 number and wound up in voicemail hell and finally gave up. For all you ipod lovers....may the force be with you. And to the fellow that mentioned the "hack" that allows you to "decloak" the audio files for downloading off the ipod...it worked about as well as the unit. I love the concept of what the ipod is all about but I guess I am going to have to wait for a real manufacturer like Sony to come up with something. I should have known better than to trust a hard drive. As a side note...Sony's broadcast television division has pretty much given up on using hard drives to capture professional video....too unreliable. Their latest broadcast camera uses a 45gb optical disc.

can't back up files?
can someone explain this to me before i buy one? i figure it's going to take a LONG time to get all my cds into the ipod. is there no way to back them up? can't you convert your cds IN your computer, make a copy and download that copy into the ipod?

hi kublakhan...to get music onto the ipod you have to:
1. Insert the CD into your computer and it will automatically pull up the track listings from the net.
2. Select the songs you want to import to your COMPUTERS hard drive. You cannot load songs directly onto the ipod.
3. Then you can upload the songs from your computers drive to the ipod.

What you can't do however is take songs OFF of the ipod's hard drive. You cannot burn CD's from the ipod for example or copy all your tunes onto another hard drive. The idea is to stop "piracy". The problem is that it does take a fair bit of time to "load up" your ipod. In my case several days to get approximately 1,000 tracks. If I used MP3 compression I could have loaded up 10,000 tracks. It is cool because you can go through all the CD's that are collecting dust on your shelf and just load the one or two tracks that you like. Unfortunately if your ipod dies so does all the time spent loading it up. It is as bad has having the hard drive on your computer fail. You loose everything. It's not the end of the world but I am disappointed that it crapped out so quickly and that getting any action out of apple means wasting yet more of my time. Can you imagine a large audio manufacturer selling you a preamp that completely fries after a couple weeks of use and maybe damages some other equipment? Audiophiles would be pretty upset and the company might go be out of business, but for some reason everybody makes excuses when it involves computer stuff.
People tolerate endless rebooting and other jiggery pockery to make the stuff operate but expect perfection from regular audio gear. The ipod concept is great but unfortunately the execution is lacking. If I had of known that .wav downloads from the ipod were verboten I would not have bought it. And if I had read that there was even a slight chance of them using a dodgy hard drive I would also not have bought it. The battery lie I would have lived with. Anyhow....anybody got any info on the iRiver forty gigger?...I wonder if they are using the same Toshiba drive?

Kublakhan-basically it'll take about 3-4 minutes on a reasonable PC to upload an album onto your hard drive from there the download takes seconds.
I've managed to just about fill my iPod over a couple of weeks so it's not horrific.
It takes seconds to download an album onto the iPod.

Of course once you have your whole collection you can back it up onto CD's or DVD's.

What the original poster referred to you can't officially upload back onto your hard drive from the iPod (obviously many people including my girlfriend do not want 40GB or more music stuck on their hard drive).
From what I can gather you can do this using non-Apple software but I haven't tried it.

The original poster is quite right to complain,the only valid experience is your own but you have to accept sometimes in life you get unlucky with a bad example of something it doesn't neccesarily make the technology bad.

Ntcsdan we were obviously posting at the same time.