As I mentioned in an earlier post, I purchased a Slim Devices Squeezebox (version 3) a couple of weeks ago as a way to get music from my file server out to my living room. Before purchasing the Squeezebox, I connected an iPod dock to my receiver and used one of my iPods to play music. The three biggest problems with that setup is that I had to walk over to the iPod to skip or repeat songs or change playlists (the cost of a newer dock and a remote was not worth the cost), it was impossible to see what song was playing from any other spot than standing in front of it, and the iPod does not natively play Ogg Vorbis or FLAC audio tracks.
I has been two weeks since I got my hands on a 160GB iPod Classic with the intention of replacing my 60GB iPod Photo so that I can carry more music with me, and maybe an occassional video or photo collection.
As reported on my last two review "journals" on the iPod Classic, there are some things about the iPod Classic that are good and some that seem like a step backwards. This journal entry focuses on a significant user experience issue with the iPod Classic and iTunes: music management and sync-ing between iTunes and the iPod Classic is painfully slow.
Each time I add a new song or podcast track to the iPod Classic using iTunes, iTunes will hang for about 10-15 seconds while using 100% of the cycles on one of the two cores on either my laptop or my desktop (both have Core 2 Duo processors running Windows XP SP2). During that time, the status message on the iPod Classic goes between "Connected" and sync-ing. I have tried connecting the iPod Classic to various USB ports and tried three different Apple USB sync cables, each came with the three iPods in the household.
If I drag over several tracks, the hang does not occur until near the end of the bulk transfer. As you can guess, this has made loading up my iPod Classic an adventure of playing with my patience and cursing out loud. The problem does not occur with neither my iPod Photo or an iPod Nano. Both iTunes and the iPod Classic are running the latest software.
After sifting through the Apple Support Discussion forums, it looks like I am not the only one with this problem.
In combination of the painful transfer hangs, the somewhat sluggish user interface of the iPod Classic and the problem of radio station presets when using the Radio Remote, my experience with the iPod Classic has not left me with a good taste in my mouth.
Apple really needs to resolve the user interface performance issues and the iTunes transfer/sync issues that are plaguing the iPod Classic.
After using my new 160GB iPod Classic for about a week, I have noticed that the UI responsiveness of going between menus and loading playlists has gotten more sluggish as I continued to add more songs and podcasts. Although the UI was more sluggish than my 60GB iPod Photo, skipping between songs on the iPod Classic seemed to be much quicker. With my iPod Photo, skipping between songs would have anywhere from a 0.5 to a 2 second delay, while it seemed nearly instantaneous with the iPod Classic.
For over a year, my portable audio player of choice has been a 60GB iPod Photo which I have loaded a good chunk of my music collection and podcasts that I have been downloading (manually I might add; I have yet to find a podcast download tool that fits my requirements). Unfortunately, I started running out of space on the iPod about 6 months ago and have been juggling podcasts and albums in order to keep a little bit of free space on it.
During Apple's recent iPod announcements, I had been hoping for an iPod that could hold more than 80GB of storage. Thankfully, a 160GB iPod Classic was announced, and while the iPod Touch was enticing, the limited storage (8GB and 16GB) put it off my list immediately. Sure, the other option would be an Archos 705 player with a large touch screen, WiFi, various video codec support and a 160GB model, but I didn't care much for portable videos and didn't really like the feel of the previous model.
