The wife wants one (this may mean I have a spare Karma), on the plus side it's got more capacity, is slimmer, and will be headunit controlled by the ICE in whatever her next car is (probably a VW).

What are the downsides?

I guess I'll have to start using iTunes (which I really didn't like the couple of times that I've played with it).

I'll lose gapless playback (appreciate this can be done by setting crossfade in a playlist but what if you just navigate to an artist/album on the fly and play without a playlist?)

And (I guess the biggest pain for me) I'll lose the bookmarks feature, something I use quite a lot.

Anything I haven't considered?

Oh yeah, she'll be using this in her tractor too, this is a noisy beast, should I get her noise cancelling headphones?

New itunes combined with fairly new ipods have quite a nifty gapless playback solution implemented. You don't need crossfade.

I couldn't get on with itunes and find that winamp does the job better for me, I use it for all my music needs anyway and at 120gb, I can just about sync. my whole collection, which, if the need arose, I could use as a back up. I don't download a great deal and do so from Amazon.
I found the video facility, together with a scart adaptor, particularly useful for hotel stays and use Videora ipod converter to encode.

Thanks guys, so no obvious downside apart from the lack of bookmarks? Boxer, do you use Winamp to sync your iPod then?

I got an iPod touch about a year and a half ago for free- that is what finally did in the Karam for us (well, that and they kept breaking ). Overall, I am pretty pleased with the touch, even though it has less (music) features than the Kara did. I also got an iPod classic. I cannot stand the menuing interface and the overall feel of it, but this maybe because I really like the way the touch works. The classic feels much clunkier than the Karma did, but it's my wife's so I haven't really had a chance to get used to it.

The only real downside to the iPods for me is the approach to synchronizing where it is easy to wipe out your entire iPod if you somehow lose your original files. My hard drive crashed and it's been a real pain getting my collection restored- so much so that I haven't done and thus haven't added any new songs in over a year (yes, I'm that lazy). Still, the touch has a nice interface that works for me, and it has held up very well.


My opinion is that for

Utility: karma > touch > classic.
Synchronizing: Karam > touch == classic
Robustness: touch > classic > karma
UI ease of use: Karma == touch > classic
Sexiness: touch > all

IMO, as flawed as it may be, iTunes is the best part of the whole iPod ecosystem. The parts I hate most in iTunes are where they've cut and created feature disparity when connecting an iPod (versus not having one connected).

I don't know if this affects you, but you can likely give up on creating playlists on the fly with the iPod. It's sort of possible, but a real PITA since you can't modify the currently playing list of music.

I find that an iPod touch is either suitable for playing through all tracks on randomly or selecting individual albums using Coverflow. With a classic I'd say you're in the same boat, but without Coverflow. In either case you can't change the way things are sorted nor really change anything about what gets display and what doesn't. By contrast iTunes can do just about anything in this regard. I'm not sure who maintains the UI for the iPod, but they clearly haven't been talking to the iTunes guys.

I mostly just use playlists created in iTunes by criteria. While perhaps not as powerful as what the Karma can do, I find this actually fits my needs very well- better than I thought.

I almost never use the coverflow, even thought it is pretty awesome. I just find the artist I want and select and album or hit the shuffle option.

The thing I like about the touch is the ability to hit "shuffle" at the beginning of any playlist and not really have to worry about turning shuffle mode on or off. In my five minutes of experience with my wife's classic I couldn't figure out how to tell it to play a playlist/album/artist in shuffle mode without first selecting the list, then changing it to shuffle (which was a pain to navigate to). Again, maybe it's just experience- but it seems much easier to get a shuffled selection of songs on the touch vs the classic.

Yep, works fine: As I say, mine is a mirror image of the audio on my hard drive, right down to the playlists.
Video, I load separately, I don't use winamp for video and, if I'm staying away, I generally load some TV programmes that I want to catch up with.
As I'd started it a long time ago, I also have a complete back up on DVD's, kept at a separate location, so I'm pretty well covered all round.
The album cover feature on both Winamp and itunes, comes up with so many wrong covers and missing covers, I don't think it's worth having(Or maybe it's my taste in music!).

Thanks guys, I'm very busy at the moment so if WinAmp works I'll probably start with that, maybe try iTunes if that doesn't do what I need, just worried about sitting there trying to figure it AND a new player out while I've got a pile of other jobs need doing.

ARRRGH! Downloaded iTunes, have created a playlist with 137 songs in it (856 Mb), I cannot get the whole playlist onto the empty 120 Gb iPod. It varies between 35 and 98 songs, have tried syncing it and doing it manually. It's got to be something simple I'm doing wrong hasn't it?

What happens when you try :P

Try it with a random assortment of other songs. My first guess on a failure would be a corrupted track, but that won't explain the failure at a random point between 35 and 98.

Does iTunes pop up any type of meaningful error? Have you tried just dragging 30 songs over to the iPod at a time?

What do you mean?

No error, will try a controlled dragging and see what happens

Now I hate to sound smug, especially with one of the more likeable Empeggers I've met, but I've never had a problem loading playlists in Winamp!

I know, I should have listened to you, and myself. Will try it later.

Just copied (via iTunes) a playlist I created in Winamp with 272 songs in it, all transferred OK. Hmmm, the trouble one was created in iTunes.

All you needed to do was right click on your playlist, click on send to: Tahir's ipod and you could have cut itunes out of the mix.
In fact, I would advise: Click on start>control panel>add or remove programs>itunes>remove - and have a happier life!

Just deleted everything and copied the playlist over again, 128 tracks, 119 have been copied. I identified the tracks that wouldn't copy over and tried to copy them manually, they won't and no error message of any kind.

Am I right in thinking that crossfade will only work if I sync via iTunes?

I think I may have cracked it. Exported the playlist so I could copy it to the Karma, when I looked at it some of the file paths were \\MP3 and others were C:\MP3, looked at iTunes library and it shows 54000 songs rather than 27000, looks like I need to clear the library and start again?

I don't know, it's something that I never do.
When you say you've got 54000 rather than 27000 tracks are you talking about syncing with winamp? If not, the following is of no use to you.
I once had this, because it was scanning a folder with all my music in and then decided to scan the sub-folders, I never worked out why.
You can check this by going to Library>media library preferences>local media>Watch folders and checking which folders it's scanning and deleting any duplicates, then library>delete missing files.
Hope that helps.

Ta boxer, will try that when I get home

When dragging your music to iTunes (or letting it read from a path) to build its initial library, did you let it look at any .m3u files? iTunes will duplicate the music in your DB if you do this, once for the actual track and once more for the reference from the .m3u file.

That's the only reason I can think of for duplicate entries in iTunes. Just delete all the m3u files (you don't need them for even semi-intelligent players), clear out all the music in iTunes and add it all back again.

Also, I always make sure to turn off the option which lets iTunes manage the location of my music. That way tracks are never copied by iTunes and instead are always added in by reference to their current location.

Yeah, I didn't want it to scan my whole music library so I imported a few. I'll clear everything out and start again, the only issue is redoing the playlist, can I delete the music and keep the playlist?

Yeah, saw that and turned it off.

Your playlist will definitely become blank if you delete the music referenced by it from your library.

If possible, you can try running iTunes from a new library location for doing some testing (you need to hold down a certain key sequence when starting iTunes and it will ask you where to create or load a new library from).

I don't really keep playlists, so I'm not the best person to ask about all their features in iTunes. If you can export the playlist then I suppose you can re-import it after reloading the music.

Of course, but I'm guessing that's how I got myself in this pickle in the first place?

Oh... Right. I suppose if iTunes exports it playlists as m3u files then when you import them it's going to also bring in the music again, causing the duplicates issue I mentioned.

One way around it might be to bring in the playlists first and then do a music drag from Explorer. Hopefully iTunes will ignore files that it already has indexed at that point. I know that for the most part I can get away with dragging a huge folder structure into iTunes and it will skip over or simply refresh the tracks it already has indexed, adding any it doesn't.

EDIT: I just did a test for you. Exporting the playlist and then later importing it after having added all your music will not duplicate the tracks. I tested with an export as plain text.

Excellent, thanks very much Bruno, hopefully I'll stop bugging people about this after tonight. I'm sticking with it because it's much easier to navigate through your library with this (and generate playlists) than Winamp.

That all worked, so I'm set. It's taken a long time to condense 27000 songs into 13 hours of playlist (we don't have parties often so we're going for an all nighter)