Trying (and failing) to give up my iPod

A few weeks ago I faced a truly horrible event in my life: My venerable iPod, a 20GB 4G model, which I've used regularly for about five years, finally gave up the ghost. I'll spare you the story of trying to revive it. It was dead, and probably long overdue at that.

While I pondered buying a new one, I began instead to wonder: Had I gone soft? Had the iPod and iTunes walled gardens made me oblivious to a better world of music management and MP3 hardware out there?

I was determined to find out.

And so I delved into the other world of music players. No, seriously, there is one. My friends at SanDisk sent me the latest Sansa Fuze to check out, and I delved into Windows Media Player, importing my 10,267 songs from iTunes to WMP.

Things were looking positive at the start. The Fuze is an incredibly sexy little music player, and it's easy and natural to use. The 8GB of internal memory wasn't much of a thrill, but you can add up to 16GB of extra memory via a microSD card, and that would give me at least more memory than I had before. It wouldn't be enough for my full library (about 45GB), but plenty for the essentials.

Windows Media Player also seemed promising. Sure, it wasn't as simple to get around in as iTunes, but years of familiarity with Windows ensured that I could find my way in it. I was especially impressed with how successful WMP was with finding album artwork and cleaning up what has become a bit of a messy library, correcting song names, fixing capitalization here and there, and even adding correct track numbers. By comparison, iTunes can't even find album artwork for The Beatle's Magical Mystery Tour.

But after working with both non-Apple hardware and software for a week, the things that started as little annoyances began to become truly aggravating. First was managing music and playlists through WMP. In iTunes, once you set them up once, your playlists are tied to your iPod unless you decide to remove them. You update the playlist on the PC, then sync, and it's done. WMP doesn't work that way. You have to drag the playlist to the appropriate column in WMP every time you want to sync it. So if you add or delete one song, you have to undertake this long process just to re-sync to your player. Add to that: On the Fuze, you have to manage the internal memory and add-on card separately, which becomes quite a pain and often ends up with duplicate songs on the device. WMP also failed to see the card in the Fuze half the time, so I'd have to pop it out and put it into a microSD card reader and access it via the card slot on my computer... yet another hassle over something that ought to be brainlessly simple to do.

Once I got the music onto the device, I was happier with the Fuze, but little things still nagged. You can't sort a playlist the way you want, for example: The Fuze playlist shows the names of the songs, but they are sorted by artist, not by title. No matter how the playlist is sorted in WMP, this is the way it shows up on the Fuze. On the iPod, the playlist is ordered however you do so on iTunes. It's a little thing, but it makes sifting through a thousand-song playlist for a single title (a common request from the kids yelling in the back seat) so much simpler.

The other problem is the lack of an accessories infrastructure for non-iPod hardware. I mainly listen to my iPod in the car via an FM radio transmitter attachment which also charged the iPod. Accessories for other products are hard to find: SanDisk told me that five transmitters exist (three are made by the same company), but none of them have great reviews. Eventually I bought a Griffin iTrip for Sansa, which took over a week to arrive in the mail.

All of the nitpicking began to weigh me down. I couldn't find my music. I couldn't sync it easily. I couldn't just start typing a song or band name into WMP to have the display jump to that part of the library like you can with iTunes; I had to use the search system or scroll -- agonizingly slowly -- to where I wanted to be. And, if I changed anything about an item midway down the library listing (say, to upload new album artwork), WMP would then reset itself and jump back to the top of the library, forcing me to start all over.

Eventually I decided I couldn't take it any more. It just wasn't worth wrestling with the headaches, and it was becoming obvious to me why the iPod's market share has stood at about 85 percent for years.

So I gave up. I bought an iPhone, moved everything back to iTunes, and haven't looked back. Works great.