iPod: iTunes SUCKS !!!

January 23rd, 2007

Well, i’m just another sucker who thought Apple designed products well. Apple products sure are pretty. But what could be the absolute worst thing that could happen when you use iTunes? Besides blowing up in your face killing your baby nephew. Yes, erasing your harddrive without warning. I backup my laptop, but not my iPod. So of course today i got my iPod wiped clean by iTunes 7. For you techies out there, its like the old “sudo rm -rf /”

What do you do when iTunes erases your iPod??? well, first stage is denial. What? no songs? eject ipod, hold it in my hand, look at artists .. blank. WHAT?? Ok, maybe i can recover .. search the web .. Oooh.. “iTunes 7 erased my iPod” happened to this guy, too. Hmm.. most of the 48 responses are people complaining how it happened to them too. OK, so maybe it did happen. Any recovery tools out there .. a few for windows, none for the mac. Let’s recheck the iPod, maybe my songs are there now. Nope. Videos gone, too. But my photos are still there. Wow.

Sigh. Luckily i have copies of my mp3s on a backup server, but i did lose all my playlists. I spent many many hours creating and tweaking these playlists – those run mixes, driving in the car mixes, chilling out on a bus mixes, and many more. I hate iTunes.

iTunes WarningOk, for the record, here’s what i did – I reproduced it to make sure i got warning message and steps correct. With my iPod plugged in, on iTunes 7 I clicked on chadpod (my name for my ipod). I clicked on the Music tab, and unchecked “Manually manage music and video”. I got the warning message in the image above – “Are you sure you do not want to manually manage music and videos on your iPod? All existing content on the iPod ‘ChadPOD’ will be replaced with content from your iTunes library.  Ok, i think “merger” when i read that, not “YOUR IPOD WILL BE ERASED”?  Clearly i was wrong.  Then I clicked Summary tab just to the right of the Music tab. I tried to sync one of my playlists automatically by checking the “Sync Music” box and selecting one of my playlists. I then had an interruption, and when i got back to my computer, I decided i didn’t have time to finish this right now, so I went to eject my iPod.  Then i got the following warning: “You have changed the settings for iPod ‘ChadPod’.  Would you like to apply these changes?”.  Umm.. Ok.  At that moment it erased my ipod – i could tell cuz it took a few seconds. Now my chadpod is blank. Wha?? Unplug from my macbook pro. Yep, wiped out. I admit that popup was a warning, but i definitely didn’t expect to lose my music and playlists. What i still don’t get is that it didn’t even sync. I have tons of music in my iTunes, none were copied.. No playlists copied. Whatever happened, it definitely was not a design flaw, it’s a bug in iTunes.

Lessons Learned:

  • Use Manual Mode to update iPod (apple info on switching to manual mode).
  • NEVER accidentally click on anything in settings – especially do not try and sync a playlist if you’re in Manual mode
  • iTunes SUCKS.

Hmm… I think i feel better now that i vented.