Talk to a layman. Talk to hardcore users. Talk to programmers. It’s a consensus: iTunes is one of the worst programs ever made. It’s a juggernaut, a resources-consuming and unfriendly application – the complaints can run several articles. But, unfortunately, you need it to run an iPod (ok, there are some alternatives on the web, but they’re usually bugged and are not accepted by the new models… yet). We almost quit buying the new iPod Touch just for fearing to go down the iTunes road again. Of course we left that thought behind us but still got a headache from running iTunes.

For starters there is no support for our version of Windows XP – we run the 64-bit XP. There’s no version of iTunes 8.0, the new release needed to run the next generation of iPods, for our OS. Apple even hides the 64-bit iTunes 8.0 meant to run on 64-bit Vista – and no matter how much computer wizardry we applied to it, there was no way for that version to run on 64-bit Windows XP. After wasting a whole afternoon trying some harebrained solution, we just gave up and installed the software on our laptop that runs on 32-bit Windows XP. Since your notebook has only 512 Mb of RAM (it’s primarily a web-browsing, typewriting, e-mail checking machine for quick travels) the poor thing now faces an uphill battle just to open iTunes.

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Figure 5: iTunes

Then we faced the usual problems: disorderly navigation and willful synchronism of files. At first, iTunes filled up our iPod with all the music files available although we had hit the “manual synchronism” button. After deleting all of them, we started from scratch. The sneaky son of a gun did it again when we were transferring photos to the iPod even tough we had selected a particular folder (“NY trip”). Video files, especially those downloaded in the .avi format, need to be converted to MP4 (a video format for mobile devices) prior to being transferred to the iPod. We used DVDVideoSoft Free Studio that you can get here. It’s easy to operate and has low, medium and high quality video settings. Then we used iTunes (oh, boy…) to transfer the converted videos so we could enjoy a personal cable TV while traveling by subway.

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Figure 6: Video playing on the iPod Touch.