Since I wrote such a nice post about my APPLE iphone earlier this year, I think it is only fair and balanced to write about how much I HATE itunes 9.
I’m not very good about updating my itunes. In the last year I haven’t purchased that much music so it hasn’t been necessary to sync my ipod very often and, hence, I seldom even open my itunes. For the most part, I only open it when I want to do an upgrade to my iphone. Which doesn’t happen very often. And earlier in the year it took so long to upgrade my iphone in the first few days of an upgrade that I vowed I would wait the next time. There was an upgrade that came out a month or so ago and I don’t think I’ve done it yet.
Well, it occurred to me that I needed to do that so last week I opened my itunes and discovered that there was an update available. I hadn’t updated my itunes in a couple of months. I’m not sure I actually updated to itunes 9 when it came out in September. I honestly don’t remember. I thought I did but maybe I didn’t. So I don’t know where I was in terms of updates before I clicked “yes” for this update but I do know that everything was working fine, including my itunes, my iphone and my 80G ipod.
I clicked “yes” to the update and that ‘s when the trouble started. I updated and everything started running really slow. But I figured the anti-virus software update was probably downloading at the same time. So all I did was update the itunes; I didn’t try to sync anything. Then, this past weekend, I decided that I should sync my ipod first because that would go faster than any iphone upgrade that I might still need. So I plugged it in and … disaster.
After what seemed like an eternity, itunes finally recognized my ipod and told me that it was corrupted. I wasn’t sure how it could be corrupted since I’d been listening to it the day before with no problem. But fine, I thought, I’ll just restore the original settings. So I clicked the restore t button and it told me (after a long while) that it couldn’t fix it. So I looked at the APPLE site and it said to disconnect and try a different port. Which I did. But that didn’t work. After an hour of looking through the APPLE site and trying every single solution they recommended I still had an ipod that wouldn’t sync.
So I started googling and came across multiple Apple support forum discussions about how this problem had been happening since September, no one had yet been able to come up with a fix for it and APPLE seemed uninterested in helping and was denying that their software upgrade had anything to do with the problems. There had been some limited success when people had reinstalled itunes fresh, so I tried that. An hour later my ipod still wouldn’t sync, I wasn’t even getting messages that it was corrupted and, worse, it had locked itself in an unusable state and I couldn’t get it unlocked. It seemed that APPLE had decided to kill my ipod!
I was pretty pissed.
For some reason (probably because I was so disgusted) I left the ipod attached to my laptop when I shut it down overnight. The next morning I started up my laptop and realized that my ipod had no charge – it had run down in the night. This was exasperating but in fact turned out to be a stroke of luck I think. Because when it finally began charging again it unlocked and all my music was still on it.
I immediately disconnected it and I will never try to sync it again. If I want to listen to new music I’ll sync that music with my iphone. I know that APPLE doesn’t really want to support the classic ipods anymore, but I’m not willing to let APPLE kill my ipod to force me to buy a new one NOW. I have a ton of music on it and I can just use it in its current state until the battery eventually gives out and won’t hold a charge anymore. (That is what happened with my first ipod. I’m fine with planned obsolescence; but not with murder.)
In the meantime, while I was recharging the ipod I started listening to music through itunes on my laptop. And to my great annoyance it kept getting stuck on songs and stopping and skipping in the middle of other songs. So I googled and guess what? This has been a problem with itunes 9 for some time now.
I still haven’t tried to sync my iphone. I’m too afraid (although it is still under warranty unlike my ipod). Maybe I’ll do that NEXT weekend. When I have more free hours in case there is a problem.
All I can say is that if APPLE doesn’t fix itunes 9, all of their advertising to convince people that they have a better product will be for naught and their reputation might as well be flushed down the toilet. What a piece of crap.
