Well, FedEx came through this morning, and I'm now the happy owner of an iPod. I can officially announce that, like the empeg|Rio car, the iPod has that one, absolutely critical, must have feature of any mp3 player worth the electricity it consumes... Breakout I'm not making this up, there's a breakout game in the iPod. As to the rest of it, the magic, transparent, perfect, DWIM sync with iTunes is all good, presuming that your tunes are on a local HFS volume (troubles with UFS have been reported, and I'm having trouble with samba shares), and there are fewer that 5GB of them. Once I get those problems sorted, I'll give you an update on the rest of it. Oh, and Apple was thinking. It does file taxi (MP3's loaded as music are hidden), and the taxi "partition" has copies of iTunes for both 9.2 and X. -Z

Heh, does the Ipod have tetris, too?

Yeah, I'm hoping that the empeg guys will implement file-taxi natively in emplode...

Further comments...

Apple did a very nice job on this one. Once I got around the shared file problem, (iTunes requires the ._* files, for no good reason) I loaded about 4GB of tunes. In 8 minutes flat. ;)

The menus are very straightforward: Playlists (haven't done a thing with playlists yet) and two 'soup' views: Artists and Songs. Artists is actually the top of the Artist/Album/Song hierarchy. At the top of the Artist and Album levels are "All" entries that take you to the next level selecting everything. (IOW, Choosing Artists>All takes you to a list of albums sorted by artist. Artists>All>All takes you to a list of songs, sorted by artist then album.

Pressing the button in the center of the wheel descends the tree, pressing play starts playing from whatever leaf you have selected.

There are two other menus: Settings and About. Pressing the menu button always takes you to whatever leaf of the overall tree (settings or song menus) you last used.

Nice little features: Sleep timer, startup volume.

From what I can tell from a bit of surfing last night, the MP3's are protected from the file taxi functionality by nothing more than the 'hidden' bit. Utilities already exist to bypass.

Oddities: The 'clicker' (think beeps) comes from the unit itself, not through the headphones.

Gripes: The screen contrast with the backlight on is pretty poor. The backlight is way brighter than it has to be, as well. (These are probably the same problem.)

Oh, and I'm kinda done with Chicago, guys. Couldn't you have used Espy?

-Z