iPod usability problem
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
One side-effect of my plans to rip all my CDs (and vinyl, too, when I get round to it) has been the discovery of an annoying usability glitch when using 2 Macs and one iPod.
My basic setup is like this:
- Mac mini (at work) with all my tunes on it (and backed up to an external drive)
- old Titanium Powerbook (at home) without enough hard drive space to hold all my tunes
- 20Gig 3G iPod
Sounds simple enough right? I want to auto-sync the mini with the iPod, and then just plug the iPod into the powerbook at home (i.e. not sync at all), so I can stream the songs from the iPod through iTunes to the hi-fi across the room. Straightforward. Or so you’d think.
A sync so auto you can’t stop it
The problem is that in iTunes, you can only set whether or not to auto-sync the iPod once it’s plugged in (see image of what you’re presented with in trying to do it before). So when I plugged the iPod into to the Powerbook (which doesn’t have any songs in its own iTunes library, remember), auto-sync started before I had a chance to change the preferences.
Because the sync-ing is only one-way (thanks to Apple’s concerns over DRM), my iPod was emptied of its songs before I got to change the settings.
‘OK, a minor inconvenience,’ I hear you say. ‘Just sync the iPod when you’re back in work and Bob’s your digital uncle.’
Yes, but. The sync setting refers to the iPod, not the computer. So if I forget to switch to manual syncing before finishing at work, when I get home and plug the iPod in, my tunes will get wiped again.
Don’t make me think
I could leave the iPod to manually sync all the time, but if I’m ripping lots of songs and pulling down some podcasts I don’t want to have to remember what’s new and risk having an imperfect mirror of all my files on the iPod. Very frustrating.
So now I switch on autosync at work, and when I’m synced, I have to remember to reset it to manual syncing before I leave home. Or else I’ll have no tunes that night, and have to copy everything back across the next morning.
A better way
There are a couple of solutions. Ideally, syncing would be linked to the computer not the iPod - so I could choose to auto sync on one machine, and not on the other.
Alternatively, include a setting on the iPod itself to control syncing - that way, I could check before I did any damage whether the iPod was going to try and sync or not.
So a small thing, but annoying nonetheless.