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.

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?

Hey ultraviolet thanks for the info on the wav's...that makes a heck of a lot of sense...basically the ipod is not up for heavy duty wav playback which means that I am likely going to run into the same problem when I get my replacement...I am still waiting...the only reason I bought it was for .wav files....I have zero interest in compression schemes since I have a hard enough time listening to CD's...you are probably correct that using hi rez mp3's I wouldn't notice the difference with earbuds...but I would in my car and certainly hooked up to my home rig...all the folks that love the ipod do so because of the convenience of all that music in a nifty little package...I guess I just expected too much from the little plastic box...I guess that is why no legitimate consumer electronics company has jumped into the "ipod" business...sony only offers a 1 gig flash player and mini disc...they are wise because they value their brand more than apple does...or as I mentioned before, computer companies seem to be able to get away with selling ill conceived "dream" products and consumers seem not to care when they don't perform as advertised...apple shouldn't sell the ipod as working with .wav files unless it does so with some degree of reliability...I am considering using an outboard drive to store and access all my CD's though...are the LaCie's any good?...they have some that go up to a terabyte...maybe too good to be true huh?
thanks for all the replies though...audiogoner's are a first rate bunch...