Slashdot Mirror
iPod Dissection and Review
Mister Man writes "I saw over at AnandTech that there is finally
a decent iPod review out there. Not only does the review include screen shots
galore, they also have some pretty cool pictures of what is inside that pretty
little box. Also discussed is information on how to connect an iPod to a Windows
based PC. Check out the
article for the real deal. Sadly, it doesn't seem like there is Linux based
software yet."
I run linux and just got an iPod ofr christmas. I was ready to hack at it to get it to work. The biggest problem is that the HFS+ drivers is "read-only" only. Until we can progress the drivers to be able to "read-write", we are stuck. There is some good Windows software. Ephpod (free software) with MacDrive/MacOpener (commerical) combo works great.
Scott
Scott
janitor
sdn website family
email: scott at sboss dot net
If I understand it correctly, what is holding iPod on Linux back is the lack of HFS+ support.
While HFS+ read support seems to be up and working (more or less), HFS+ write support is just not there. It's been on wishlists for years, but so far no luck.
Can anyone say what the stumbling block is? Is it lack of or misleading documentation? Is it a patent issue?
Is there code in Darwin that could be legally borrowed and turned into an HFS+ module?
if you can write to an hfs+ drive you dont need any special software, the iPod keeps it's music in a hidden folder called `music` right on the drive, just drop your mp3s in there and you can play them.
--aiee
Of course there's nothing Creative! They don't make the iPod, Apple does.
Silly first poster, Creative makes Nomads.
I'm a little fascinated by Slashdot's ongoing fixation on this device. I mean, it is Apple-only at this point (Mediafour's PC-compatability efforts notwithstanding) and no one seems to be talking about Linux interactivity at all, aside from suggestions on how to basically hack into the hard drive. People keep saying it's expensive, that nobody will want it, and yet the local nerds keep bringing it up.
My only theory as to why is because it may not be Linux-y, but it's still a fascinating device. Aside from the technical challenges involved in accessing it from Linux, it's still a totally unique approach to MP3 players, from the interface to the controls to the expandability to the super-high-speed FireWire. It's Apple, which means it's about as proprietary as they come, but the geeks keep wanting to take it apart and make it work for them.
And I don't think it's because they want to break the proprietariness. Apple does that for convenience (theirs), not to lock people out, and anyone with a FireWire port on their Linux box and enough software-writing experience can eventually get it to sync with their favorite MP3 player. Microsoft locks down their software and people hack it because they don't like being told "no." Apple does it to sell iMacs, and people hack it because they don't want an iMac.
But what that means is they do want the iPod. If it weren't so expensive, I don't doubt it'd be Linux-ized already. Hopefully next year it'll be $100 less with a 10GB model replacing it, and we'll see a little more hacking going on.
But to me, this sounds like a success story for Apple. Yes, we all know its pricey and proprietary, but Slashdotters just can't seem to keep their eyes off of it. And if Apple can draw that much drool from the free software community, I think it's proof positive they know what they're doing.
As with all other song information on the iPod, the artist information comes from the MP3's ID3 tags, which it pulls and stores in a database for easy access.
/.'er will reply with info about a tool that will automate this process, thus radically simplifying my purchasing rationalization^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H decision.
...Anyone?
Am I the only one whose ID3 tag info is sorely lacking across his entire collection? Either I've got a lot of work ahead of me before I'm iPod-ready, or some benevolent
Just dropping the mp3s onto the iPod hard disk doesn't allow you to play them.
The iPod keeps track of everything in a song database; you need to figure out how to create and modify this database in order for the iPod to recognize and play songs.
Yeah, this is way offtopic, but here goes:
I have the iPod, and love it. My only gripe with it is that names/albums are sorted with any existing 'A' or 'The' at the beginning of the string. If I want to play something by The Jam, I intuitively scroll to the Js, not the Ts. At least with iTunes, I can do radical ID tag surgery before I rip the CD...
I had to get into completing my ID tags a *long* time ago, because the MacOS only supports 31 character filenames (X will do 255, but this was 1998-ish), so a filename like "various_artists_pulp_fiction_soundtrack_02_dick_d ale_miserlou.mp3" would come out like "various_artists_pulp_ficti.mp3" and that doesn't really tell me a whole lot, does it? :)
:)
I push for folks using the ID3 tags for this reason, and for a more important, non-platform related one: if the tags are complete, there are tools that will rename the file to whatever the hell YOU want.
Don't like album_artists_song_track? How about album_track_song? or year_song_artists_album_track? or any combo of the above? If the tag's there, and more importantly COMPLETE and CORRECT goddamit, you have the option. With no tags, I'm gonna go fill them in anyways, so why not just put them there when ripping? There are a zillion programs that will cddb or freedb lookup for ya.
Heck, even if all your songs are album_artist_track_song or whatever, there should be tools available that will translate those into meaningful tags. Just don't ask me about em cuz I don't know.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
However, this is an audio device. Why so few reviews discussing its audio quality? How does it stack up to, say, a decent quality mini-disc player? Not in terms of tech features, but just quality of sound?
My own opinion? I love the look of it, and most particularly the size of it. I'm one of those who will need to wait for XPlay, but that looks to be coming along nicely. My only quibble is that I'll still need to get an FM radio - it would have been great had an FM radio been included. People still need to find out about new or different music as well as listen purely to their own collection.
However, once XPlay is publicly working with playlists and deletes, an iPod is likely to be in my pocket before the week is out...
Cheers,
Ian
Why oh why did they call the Windows software XPlay?
I guess we'll have to call the Linux X-Windows version "WinPlay".
bp
A couple of reasons...
-Apple's marketing strategy revolves around the idea of the "digital hub." The iPod (and iTunes) are a major component of this strategy. Note that these commodities are exclusive to Apple. By producing a Windows version of the iPod, both Apple and Windows users would be able to experience the same great music experience. Apple wants to distinguish itself from the rest of the PC market, not cater to it. Making the iPod Mac-exclusive serves as an incentive for users to go Mac.
-Practically speaking, in terms of both production and support, Apple would be inviting trouble on itself by producing a PC version. Though Apple has tinkered with PC products before, everyone would agree it is not their forte.
-Why produce an entirely new version of the iPod when Windows users, granted with an extra cash outlay, already will be able to use the original? Simply because Firewire isn't standard on PCs yet? Please.
My current favorite is ID3-TagIT. It lets you go back and forth from filenames to tags in both directions, supports batch tagging and batch renaming, upper/lower case correction, id3v1<->id3v2, automatic sorting into folders, etc. It's very comprehensive and easy to use.
http://giantlaser.com/~jason/ipod.html
...
interesting link
The first item that jumps into view upon dissecting the iPod is the battery. Made by Sony-Fukushima, the battery is a [...]
I couldn't help, after reading that, of thinking of the time Homer was looking at a globe and pointed to Uruguay...
"Heh heh.. You are gay!"
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
But, according to http://www.macobserver.com/article/2001/10/29.4.s
So why has Mediafour "decided to respect Apple's wishes" when Apple's own software allows the copying of MP3's to different Macs?
You need MacDrive or MacOpener to be installed too but if it allows me to copy MP3's from an iPod to the PC (which neither XPlay or iTunes allow you to do) then its going to be a winner.
ps. Yes I know why they've done it but its something I (and probably others) would find useful whatever your moral standing.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Apple's making alot of money from the iPod, and not just from the device's sales. The iPod is bringing in people to the Apple Store, where many of them end up buying Macs. 40% of the Apple Store's computer buyers don't already own macs.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
. . . with Apple's products is that they are too trendy and hip.
I picture my living room with an iMac in it, or at the gym with an iPod and just shake my head. Is that not the most conspicous of consumption or what?
Driving around a midwest hamlet in my Saab is bad enough; if the locals see me with an alien looking device in hand I might just get run out of town!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
This review is nice and informative, but I can't help but scoff at the sentence (on the first page) pointing out the "fatal flaw in the iPod design": It only works for MacOS.
"Fatal flaw in the iPod design"? Give me a fucking break. "Pain in the ass for Linux and Windows users", sure. But to imply that it's a design flaw would be to say that somehow Mac exclusivity was not in the designer's plans. I think it's fairly bloody obvious why Apple would design a cool peripheral that could only be used with its own OS. It's not by accident, or by poor design. It's 100% intentional.
That's like saying "Puccini's Turandot is a great opera; its fatal flaw is that it's not in English".
Do domain names matter?
I've had my iPod since late October and I love it. It has worked flawlessly and live up to all of my expectations. I was afraid of how sturdy it would turn out to be, but I've managed to drop it a few times (once from about chest height) with no ill effects. My Rio 600 was totally destroyed after being dropped from the same height. I only have 2 complaints:
...
1. The stainless steel back does scratch easily... mine was scratched after just a couple of days of carrying it in the pockets of my coats and jeans. Still, though, peple see it and say "hey, is that one of those Apple MP3 things?"
and
2. I don't really like the earbuds. I can't wear them for more than a few minutes without getting sore ears. No big deal, though, I just got some head phones. I've never found any earbuds that I like, however, so I was not expecting to be happy with the ones that come with the iPod.
It works great in FireWire disk mode as a quick backup disk or as a quick way to transfer large files from one Mac to another. I've read about people who have booted their Macs from an iPod, but Apple does not recommend doing that. I believe that it's because the internal disk was not designed to spin for long peroids of time or to hold up to frequent reading and writing. I don't know for sure, but that's what I am guessing.
The battery life is stupendous and actually exceeds the 10 hours that Apple lists in the specs. I listen to mine at work all the time and it never drops below about 50% or so.
Some people have complained about the lack of an on-board equalizer, but you can do that in iTunes and the settings are applied to the MP3 file & the iPod recognizes them when the file is transferred so that's not really a big deal.
It does get a little warm... when it's been playing for a long period of time. Nothing like the G3/G4 PowerBooks though.
All in all, it's the best MP3 player I've seen. Sure, it's only a 5 gig hard drive, but the ease of use more than makes up for that minor shortcoming.
That font is actually an old typeface called Chicago, and looks nothing like Apple Garamond. It does make the iPod look more Mac-like, though in a retro sort of way (Apple hasn't used that font in years). I imagine the reason it was selected for the iPod is the same reason the old Mac OSs used it. Their UI research determined that Chicago was superior as a screen font in terms of readability and the thicker appearance also made it easier on the eyes; remember this is long before GUI-level antialiasing was available.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
I know this is practically flamebait here but, look at it from this perspective. Out of all the MP3 players out there, which platform did they work for first? That's right, you got it, more than likely Windows. So Apple comes out with the iPod and everyone whines and complains that the small shiney new toy doesn't play well with windows. Yeah I'm sure that's Apple Computers number one priority, right along with handing out iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and now iPhoto to windows users too. So you are all whining because Apple is playing favorites for the people who actually BUY their computers?
Windows users, usually get everything in the computer industry first with the exception Apple stuff, and open source and there are reasons for this. Windows users make up the largest share of the consumer computer industry, so they have all the deals to get everything for windows first becuase that's where the majority of the money will be made for the companies that make that hardware/software/printer/scanner/whatever.
So you windows users are going to complain when the other team has something that some of you think is better that they aren't being fair? I'm sure some company will make a knock off for you soon enough.
Moderating to further my personal world domination agenda... and to get chicks.
I've wanted an iPod since they came out. They are small, work extremely well, and produce good sound. Even with the high price, they are worth while. Of course, the problem is you really need a Mac to make all the bells and whistles work. This isn't a problem for apple though.
Between the iPod, the ease of creating a home DVD (iMovie, iDVD, + third party high end stuff, if you need it), manipulating pictures (iPhoto) and organizing your music (iTunes) Apple has got it right. I used to be a Mac lover, and now I'm ready to become one all over again. After seeing the new iMac in the store (which will fit on the kitchen desk, something my PC never has done) I'm going in whole hog.
What does that mean for apple? Well, they will get me for an iMac plus an iPod. Additionally someone (cannon, likely) will get a MinDV and a new still digial camera out of it. The digital hub is here, and is only going to get better.
The hold up for the Mac has always been other software. For my needs that's all there as well now. There are good ssh clients and terminal emulators. Office works, better than windows in fact. IE is available (yes, for web work you have to have it). Heck, there are even respectable games these days.
I think Apple is on the comeback, and I think their digital hub is a smash hit idea, both for the home user who "just wants it to work", as well as for the geek who "just wants the mundane to work" so he can get on with the cool stuff.
Am I the only one whose ID3 tag info is sorely lacking across his entire collection? Either I've got a lot of work ahead of me before I'm iPod-ready, or some benevolent /.'er will reply with info about a tool that will automate this process...
/iTunes best recognize ID3 v2.3.0 tags.
You are not alone. Even folks who use an auto-tagger when ripping our CDs have trouble, since the CDDB isn't terribly consistent with artist names, etc..
The most effective solution for sprucing up MP3 tags is a Mac-only app, MP3 Rage. It will do such nifty things as strip "The " from band names, and create ID3 artist/title/album tags based on file-containing folders and file names (e.g. MP3s/Pop/Cake/Fashion Nugget/01-Frank Sinatra.mp3). You probably have your MP3s organized this way already, so it might take 10 miutes to tag your entire collection.
I apologize in advance for recommending a commercial, Mac-only product. If you want to write you own app, you should know that the iPod
I just don't get it..
It is dead simple.
The Ipod is the size of a deck of cards -you can put it in your top pocket. The Archos, well, it's quite a chunk bigger.
The Ipod is beautifully designed - it looks very smooth. The Archos, well, it's not a pretty beast.
The Ipod does have less storage, but a lot of people won't have the ~600 CD's needed to fill a 40GB drive.
The Ipod can't record, but usually people rip on their computer (or think in that way) - usually when you are travelling to work, etc., you wouldn't use the record function. For every 100 hours of playing, unless you are in specialist situations, you'd only really record for 1 hour.
Those reasons are why I'd probably go for the Ipod and not the Archos, even though I don't have a mac.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
That's why. Avoid a lawsuit from the RIAA and still allow a competitive advantage (moving files).
Yes, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone did HFS+ write now that the iPod is out. However up until this point there was no compelling reason for someone to hack in support for it. Chances are almost anyone with the ability to write the code wouldn't be caught dead with a mac...
I agree with yuor assumptions, but in the review in the article, they said the CPU was deisnged to decode MP3 and WMA files. So, the hardware capability seems to be there, just not in the OS.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Here are four of the reasons:
1) Archos is somewhat bigger (in each of H, W and D)
2) Archos has slower transfer rates (USB 2 vs Firewire)
3) Archos is a lot lot uglier.
4) Archos weighs a lot lot more (350g vs 185g)
There are many more, but that's enough to be going on with.
Yeah, and the Sony DiscMan sucks, too. It's limited to a meager 700MB of storage, won't play MP3s or even cassettes (and as long as that format has been around, there's NO excuse for that!) and don't even talk to me about vinyl!
So I guess what I'm saying is, stop whining.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
The other issue is writing to the ipod database. Simply slapping songs on the iPod won't allow them to play. The database has to be populated, On macs this is done by iTunes.
i'm an impulse buyer. i have a win2k box but my dad has a cube, so i figured i wouldn't be totaly dead in the water. here are my observations:
i never cared about id3 tags because i centralize my meta info in a database. after my first import, i had 3 differient spellings and therefore 3 differient artists for the dave matthews band. no delete capability in Xplay. FRICK! nothing a perl script (and my dad's mac) can't fix though.
other than that, Xplay rocks. i had 1 or 2 stability problems, but it gets the job done. on the face of it, it seems more than just a read / write HFS+ filesystem going on in here. there is a database that gets populated with id3 info. not sure if that's some sort of layer over the filesystem, or if the db just gets populated seperatly.
i would have liked a more standard filesystem so i could use this thing as a general firewire drive. (as it stands, i can move big files from mac to mac. pointless for me.)
audio quality rocks. i a/b tested this with winamp (whose quality sucks) and splay (still my favorite). it's up there.
the earbuds aren't the most comfortable, but it's saveing grace is the volume level. this thing can get LOUD! the other mp3 players never really could cut it for me.
gets scratched easily, but it smells realy nice. big thing with me. smells like a new hard drive you just opened. and it keeps smelling new car'ish.
literature says it holds 20 minutes in ram. (anti skip) you pick a set of tunes to play and press play. there is a pause as it spins up it's disk and then play begins. i guess it preloads the files then and spins the drive down. if you skip 4 or 5 songs (20 minutes worth) you have to wait for the drive to spin up again. takes a second or 2. no big deal, i'm just impatient.
hopefully it's best feature will be that it forces us to get read/write HFS+ going. if so, i'd look into trying to repartition the drive so i could have a 5 meg FAT partition that could hold the windows / linux HFS+ drivers and use this thing as a portable hard drive as well.
Put it another way. Apple claims it sold 100,000 iPods in two months. I'm skeptical, but assume that's correct. That means a PC-compatible version could have sold a million. Well probably not -- there's the firewire issue. But imagine the impact of even doubling sales. Economies of scale, leading to lower prices. More credibility for Apple products, leading to more people consider Macs over PCs. Etc.
What's really interesting is that Apple chose to make the iPod look like an HFS disk. There's no reason they couldn't have used something more standard -- the iPod isn't MacOS-based after all, and the Mac platform isn't that picky. But HFS is "better" than non-Mac file systems. Once again, the techno-cool factor won out over practical considerations.
iDisk/iTools use WebDAV now (Only on OS X, not OS 9). The iPod is a special-case FireWire drive that's formated with HFS+.
± 29 dB
Okay, here is where I gloat about scooping everyone. When the iPod was first announced, I did my homework and figured it the hard drive used was the Toshiba MK5002MAL, and it turned out to be the HDD1242 which are, in fact, the same drive.
Here is where I get to gloat about being ahead of the curve for once! Yippie!
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
>Since when does Slashdot talk about OSes other than Linux?
Hmm, maybe
AtheOS
FreeBSD
OSX
BeOS
These of course are just a few of the more frequent ones, QNX seemed to come up often a little while ago, oh and don't forget Emacs, some consider it an OS all in itself. Then there's that goatse.cx OS I've been hearing about.
man RTFM
No manual entry for RTFM.
USB 2.0 is (theoretically) slightly faster than the first revison of firewire/IEEE-1394. That's assumming, of course, that you don't have USB 1.0 devices connected.
It may be a bit late now, but I was lucky enough to pick up the habit of filling out the ID3 tags after downloading, but before listening.
Get in the habit of spending a minute or two filling 'em out when you download or rip an album, and you can save yourself the "oh my God, I have how many to fill out?" frustration a few years down the road.
You need to use an application that shows invisible files. In OS X, use TinkerTool. In OS 9, use Greg's Browser or something like that.
Once you've got invisible files/folders showing, use the following path:
"iPod_Control/Music"
Inside this folder are a series of other folders named "F01, F02, F03,...etc."
Your music files are grouped in there in their original MP3 glory. I don't pretend to have parsed out the rationale/pattern for placement of songs in the "F" series of subdirectories.
Another way to do it is posted on Macworld.com here.
Disclaimer: The above is from memory and hastily prepared. Feel free to correct me, but no need to get pissy!
Why? A single 32M RAM chip costs about a buck. The engineering behind a special "slow-rotating-to-save-battery-life" hard drive would cost billions.
Wanna save more battery life? Use a 64M RAM chip and cache most of a CD's worth (at 128 kbps) of music whenever an "album" heuristic comes up, such as "user is playing Track 01 of a directory of songs all ID3-tagged or filenamed as being from the same artist".
Music is in a hidden folder, so if you access the hidden folder, all is fine. I downloaded freeware called iPod Free File Sync (Mac OS 9 only) that does this. Works like a charm.
sulli
RTFJ.
Especially since the release of OS X, but even before with LinuxPPC and YellowDog, among others, the Macintosh has gotten increasing attention from the 'geeks'.
if apple were to ever make the ipod usable with windows, they would, the support would be built into quicktime. that way, everyone that buys an ipod has quicktime installed, therefore largely increasing the quicktime installed base. of course this would happen with quicktime 6 or so when mpeg4 support gets built in. mpeg4 and ipod would make windows users actually want to use quicktime, especially if they remove the annoying ads
Can't the BSDs legally adopt BSD code, in this case Darwin HFS+ support, into their OSes and therefore read/write to the iPod without any further FS hacking?
Unlike Linux?
Anyone running BSD on a PC with firewire and owning an iPod able to attest to this?
GPL Deconstructed
So what will this do to all of my The The albums?
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Not only that, the fact that the drive is only reading occasionally and most of the time the player is reading from the RAM buffer means that you are far less likely to damage the drive when using the player in high-shock situations.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Ick. USB 2.0 claims 480 Mb/s. Firewire/IEE1394/iLink claims 400 Mb/s (with promised upgrades to 800 Mbs and beyond...)
I can just imagine semi cluless consumers trying to figure out the difference between to two protocols. It'll be just like the Beta vs VHS format war.
What economic system would this work under? The one we're currently using is full of $100 MP3 devices that connect to any system with a USB port. I think the iPod is pretty cool, but I find it very hard to imagine anyone spending $2K for one!
"Vast new platform"?
Linux, vast?
Sober up.
P.S. MAD Props for the marathon sig :-D
--hongpong.com
I believe it's something like:
4. Quick -- put ads all over your site.
------------
"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."
Linux *does* support the Archos products, as of Kernel version 2.4.14 or so. Look for the "isd200" driver in the USB section. It looks like a SCSI drive to the system. I use it all the time :)
> A) the rest of the industry to copy the iPod (which is probably inevitable but could take up to a year including a good interface) or B) Apple to come out with a 10gig or larger iPod (maybe less than 6 months now)
the rest of the industry is copying the iPod rather quickly. As for the 10GB drive, you'll have to wait for a 10GB drive in the 1.8" form factor. Since the 5GB drive is currently the max for that form factor, the 10GB may take a while to appear.
The 10-12 hour battery in the iPod and charging over FireWire means you don't have to manage the battery at all, unless you are a really, really avid listener. You just plug the thing into your computer at the end of the day, and it will likely still have a lot of juice left. The next day it is ready to go with a full charge again. For many users, they will never, ever, run out of juice with their iPod. That's an intangible feature that's not easy to represent on spec sheets, but when you're using it, you realize that it is very, very liberating not to have to manage a device's battery life.
This is also why Palm continues to clean PocketPC's clock. Many people can run a grayscale Palm machine for weeks on a single charge, so they sync with their address book or back up data more often, which means, again, that they don't manage battery life, because the Palm charges in its cradle while it's sync'ing without them even thinking about it, rather than expiring unexpectedly because it has no juice.
If you think about it, any device that can't do one day's worth of normal use is buggy. You shouldn't have to feed a portable device more than once a day.
Also, iPod is really, really small and really, really light. I have most of my favorite albums on my PowerBook G4, which is 1" thick and 5 lbs and often travels with me, but an iPod hides in my jean jacket and can go with me everywhere.
> but don't get this level of attention
> because they don't have the marketing
> weight of Apple.
I guess when you really don't want to admit that something is good you can always say that the people who like it are idiots who have been hypnotized by marketing. I think iPod will be remembered 10 years from now as the first proper file-based walkman. The combination of features that it has, including an interface that people learn in five seconds without a manual, makes it a jukebox that you can fit in your shirt pocket, and that's going to be the form factor the same way that the PowerBook's form factor has become standard on portable computers (palm rest with a pointing device in the center, then a keyboard, then a display). The iPod interface may become the new "transport controls", replacing the tape-inspired ones on CD players. Track to track forward and back buttons is not the way to get around a collection of thousands of files.
I think what you're missing is that you have a LOT of music, so capacity is probably your key feature. Most people don't have enough music to fill an iPod, even at the 160kbs that Apple uses as a default (the 1000 songs number also assumes 160kbs), so they are much, much more interested in size, weight, connectivity, ease of use, fun, style, etc. in their music player.
I just read that Archos has a FireWire-based player coming out soon, so they will be second with that. I don't think they're doing it to be stylish, but rather because the keyboard port is not the right place to hook up a hard disk. Think about it. It's funny that so many Intel users like to know they have ATA/133 and whatever else and then turn around and defend USB for the hard disk in their music player. No, it's not the right way to do it.
It's worth it if you have a need for it, like many of Apple's customers do. The Cinema Display has always been a great value. It has replaced two big CRT's in many studios.
i strongly suspect this is a CDDB issue, not an iTunes issue. i've inserted several import CDs, including one Japanese one (Ghost in the Shell soundtrack), and it all worked fine. kanji and kana show up as expected.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.