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XPlay: iPod with Windows
meanie writes "Mediafour, a company which specializes in cross-platform software introduced the XPlay software to link up your iPod with Windows. Looks like a solid product, but since I didn't buy an iPod due to lack of a Mac, I haven't been able to check out the software. Anyone try this yet? I might just buy an iPod now."
Now if I get an Ipod I can go to CompUSA and download Office XP from a Windows PC onto the Ipod's hard-drive.
$cat
I tried out the beta version with the 5 gig model. It works pretty well. I think they did a good job of extending the iPod's audience.
.doc, etc.)
One thing that the poster failed to note was that it does allow you to seamlessly transport files between the two platforms, and, in some cases, will even aid in file translation, by reading the MacOS file descriptors and translating those into simple extensions (.mpeg,
I wonder if Steve's going to patch the iPod to make it incompatible with 3rd party software such as this?
Michael C. Hollinger
Thanks to built-in MacDrive technology, XPlay even makes your iPod appear as a normal hard drive
I've owned other MP3 players and always had to deal with a special interface to add and remove files. This is the first time I've seen an MP3 player represented as another drive, making it super easy to manipulate your playlist!
This should lure a lot of Windows users to the iPod, or at least pique their interest.
I am the evil aardvark!
The iPod is amazing. It's hard to believe no one has released a better mp3 player and it's been out for over a year or more now. There was a recent article about it on Zdnet, talking about USB2 vs FireWire on the iPod. Anyways, the fact that it now has software support for windows should definatly boost its sales. I'm surprised Apple didn't release a client in the first place for Windows. Now i just have to wonder why i would possibly do with 10 gigs of music?
- tristan
But haven't tried it. I think Apple may have really screwed itself now that Toshiba and SonicBlue (Rio) both have very nice Win-compatible HD based players. Sure, you can't get your name engraved on them.... :)
just buy an Archos Jukebox, has win & linux support and 20gb storage..
allright it may not look so nice, but alas
How can the submitter make any claim to its solidity as a product when they've never used it? to be honest, it sounds like a cool product, but how well it works can't be interpreted from FUD.
This sound a little familiar to anyone else?
:)
Guess the editors lack some long term memory.
---
"how can the same street intersect with itself? i must be at the nexus of the universe!" - cosmo kramer
Another option is EphPod.
-- Erv Walter
I bought an iPod for about 2 months now (the 10GB version) and I don't own a Mac. My Gateway notebook only has a 4-pin (??? the small one anyway) FireWire port, but it works fine with the iPod.
I downloaded the XPlay beta versions and have had success using it since the beginning, although there have been a few hiccups along the way.
I just purchased XPlay 1.0 online today, but have not installed it yet. The last feature that I was waiting for was to be able to permanently disable the system tray icon and now they say that they enabled it...so I am happy.
Overall, a good product...although I do wish I could copy my MP3s from it, instead of only to it.
I did try my iPod with my mom's iMac/iTunes and it worked great...definitely the best way to go, but XPlay is the next best thing.
-> richard
That is the second or third time this has been posted... One on XPlay, another on that other one. Let pudge do his job Jamie; post apple articles to the apple section. You can still have them come up on the main page.
Try this one
or this one
$499 for the iPod, plus ~$30 for a firewire addon card (unless you have one on your mb, or have SBAudigy), plus $30 for the software... adds up to a very pricey little toy on a Windows machine.
I've been sitting on the sidelines for a while now because of the costly barrier to entry, and pretty much given up on the iPod. Toshiba's unit, though maybe not as cute and revolutionary, makes a whole lot more sense on a Windows system both technically and financially.
no matter how cool a portable music device is, i really just can't justify a purchase in the multiple hundreds of dollars for what is basically a slightly better discman.
it's like spending an extra $1000 on a PC just to play games and pirate DVDs.
give that cash to something more worthwhile.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
There's a sourceforge project for HFS Plus on Linux listed as an alpha kernel patch which seems usable as of 6/6. HFS Plus is the filesystem used on the iPod, and Linux already has good 1394 mass storage support, so somebody just needs to roll a nice song browser, and the linux users can have an iPod too.
;) ;)
OK, Linux users probably don't need a song browser, but it sure would be nice.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
my ipod was amazing for the time that it worked (about 5 days). Xplay was amazing, worked without flaw. I blame their lack of a "beta expired" message for killing my ipod. They put an error up instead which read "your ipod must be disconnected and reconnected to function since you recently did an ipod restore". I then proceeded to try other programs to fix it, ended up formatting the entire hard drive, and now whenever i plug it in it reboots my computer. xplay, i loved you, but why in hell did you not give a simple "beta expired" message??? my 400 dollar toy is now a farking paperweight!!!
The Archos Jukebox has been doing this longer than any I've found. I've been eyeing these wonderful toys from their initial press releases and I must say they are what iPod aimed to be (and succeded). If only they had a harder marketing push...
http://www.archos.com
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The iPod looks pretty cool and I would buy one, however, I am waiting for Ogg Vorbis support. MP3 is a lame technology due to software patents. Not to mention that my entire CD collection is in Ogg Vorbis format and I am not about to convert it. But as soon as Apple sees the light I'll be all over it.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I've read that Apple will release iTune for Windows with iPod support next month. (Steve Job's words)
The word on the street is that Apple is going to release their own Windows iPod software as soon as Macworld July. Remember you heard it here first. Unless you heard it somewhere else already :)
I suppose it's a good idea. Tons of folks have speculated that Apple sells more Macs because people want iPods and need Macs to run them. This may be true, but perhaps the iPod can be the "gateway drug" of PC to Macintosh conversion for some.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Just bought it last night, and it works perfectly. Seamless install, plugged in my iPod, appeared as an f: drive on my system, browsed through perfectly (it uses nice XP style icons, even though I'm not on XP) and dragged and dropped a whole bunch of folders on it which were sent to the iPod super quick. Even copied four sets of folders at the same time with no noticable slowdown.
Lovely.
Can I also say that I've had the iPod for months because I have a Powerbook G4, it's just easier for me on the Windows machine because that's where my 13Gb MP3 collection is (I ripped every CD I own), hooked up to my slimp3 (http://www.slimdevices.com).
I though 10 GB would be plenty too, but now I have 12+Gb of MP3s...
It allows you to hook your iPod up to your PC's FireWire card and use it like a hard drive. You just "Drag And Drop"(TM) the .mp3 files that you want to use, and the iPod's on-board software takes care of playback.
I haven't figured out a way to order the songs, though. With a Mac running iTunes, you just change the way the songs are sorted, and the changes are saved on the iPod. Or, you could create new playlists for the iPod and customize the playback order. Or, you could just turn the shuffle feature on the iPod if you don't have a preference. Regardless, I got a copy of XPlay, and I was mostly pleased with it. It lets me take files from home to the office and vice-versa, so it's manageable for what I need. I prefer using iTunes to "Hot-Sync"(TM) my iPod because of the extra features, but XPlay is certainly manageable.
We've already had a discussion thread about XPlay before, so you may find some helpful info there.
As far as the iPod is concerned, I couldn't be more pleased. I have the 10gig version, and it stores all 90+ of my CD's. I've spent weeks sorting through songs and getting things organized. It's a lot of fun, and the interface is super-intuitive. If you're interested in getting the iPod, note that the 10gig version ships with the latest version of iPod software, where the 5 gig does not. You can download a free update from Apple, but I'm not entirely sure how a PC user without Mac access would install the update. I'm sure your local Apple dealer would accommodate you if you were nice to them, especially if you lived close to an Apple Store.
Right, because reinventing a piece of hardware is much easier than reinventing the software to access it.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
i have an ipod and use XP, and i like xplay. the latest beta's got even better at integrating ipod's disk into windows explorer. the other option is ephpod which is a standalone app but requires macopener by dataviz. this is the most annoying piece of software ever.
One word: FIREWIRE.
Firewire is the iPod's killer feature. On purchasing my iPod, I transferred 3.5 gig of mp3s to it in the space of less than three minutes. Moving songs on and off of it is so fast that I don't even think about it; it's nearly instantaneous.
My iPod has replaced my old Zip drive, as well; I use it for all file transfers between work and home. It's tiny, convenient, incredibly simple to use, and blazingly fast.
The USB-based Archos is archaic.
Since then things improved rapidly, and the company is responsive to what people say. The software is working well for me (final beta, not upgraded to 1.0 as yet) and they even added a playlist-related feature that I requested.
Its advantage over Ephod is that it includes an HFS+ reader with the software. Ephod requires you to have some form of Mac drive-reading software already (MacDrive or MacOpener), whereas XPlay comes with a stripped-down MacDrive driver anyway.
Cheers,
Ian
Whats the problem with a solid state solution? Would it be expensive/hard to have a little box with a firewire/usb socket on the side, and 256/512/1024 mb of standard pc ram inside? With the speed of firewire, it wouldnt matter if turning it off made you lose all the data - you`d just download what you wanted again. What sort of battery would you need to keep that much ram refreshed for, say, 12 hours?
It's worth noting that since iTunes and iPod are commercial products, Apple has covered the necessary licensing fees for you (read, passed them on to you), so if you're only using a Mac/iTunes/iPod for your music, you don't need to feel guilty about not paying any licensing fees or using a product illegally.
If the issue is just that you don't want to use any products covered by patents, you'd have to get rid of most of your appliances, cars, computers, electronics, etc., living in the woods with home-built tools. OK, you could have electricity and a phone but you'd have to buy a service panel and phone that were more than 17 years old. Most new phones have DSP's, and the DSP code is covered by software patents. It's a grim reality, but reality nonetheless.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Its great that Windows users will get to feed MP3s to this player, however, without iTunes, I think you will be missing the full "iPod Experience". I don't think I have ever seen a hardware product work so well with software. Its just plain seamless. Even my Mom was able to figure it out on the first try when my Dad gave an iPod to her after seeing mine. The VCR flummuxes her -- it has flashed 12:00 for three years.
I am sure that XPlay is some devious plot by Steve Jobs to get all of you guys to switch. I don't see how XPlay can compete with iTunes in dealing with the iPod. iTunes is the best UNIX based MP3 player around, if not the best MP3 player, period.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Ive used several of the xplay betas and they all had serious issues with 'write errors' and corrupted song databases. Several times my only fix was to wipe the ipod clean and start over which was frustrating, but the software was beta what was I to expect? Im now using ephpod + mac opener on XP and its been solid as a rock and its interface is far superior to that of xplay IMHO -- way more features.
http://www.ephpod.com/
I would highly recommend this as a better alternative to xplay.
So unless there is some sort of Firewire -> USB convertor then I'll never be able to transfer files to/from machines which don't have a firewire card in. I simply can't pop open my work PC and stick a card in - they'd have hysterics.
Shame really for me, but for a lot of people this probably won't be a problem.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I have a birthday coming up soon - my 21st =) Basically my parents are giving me a bunch of Polo shirts and the like, which is nice but not as exciting as what I got when I was a kid (of course). I am thinking about asking for an iPod in lieu of a new wardrobe, or just buying one myself.
That said, I use WinXP on an Athlon. I've heard that EphPod is a great piece of software as well, and with MacOpener costing about the same as xPlay does, they compete on price. Is there anyone out there who has used both? Which one is better? Also, do you have to use a Mac to flash your firmware? Appreciate any replies.
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
how do you update your iPod?
I want 2D games back.
*yawn* How many times has this been written about?
I have been doing the beta test stuff with xPlay on my 10 gig iPod and purchased the 1.0 version yesterday.
I had a few minor problems with a couple of the betas with respect to firewire ports. In my case the Audigy Fireway ports sometimes hung, but many others had no difficulty whatsoever with the Audigy cards. I went to the Adaptec Duo card and have had no problems since.
I have about 1,663 mp3s at 140 kbit or so encoding and have used about 7.34 gig of the 9.27 or so available. I use the remaining 1.92 gig to backup the office data daily. Works great. Obviously, it is not a longterm backup solution but it amounts to the belt part of my "belt and suspenders solution." It gives me that little extra comfort level.
Now I just need to find a cassette adapter which will work in my GM car radio and I will be happy.
This may be true for the older Archos devices, but the Archos 20 recorder has a USB 2.0 interface which should compare quite well with the firewire interface of the iPod. Besides, how many people are really going to be actively transfering multiple Gigs of MP3s back and forth between their player and their computer? I would expect that most users will load all of their music on their player once and then not have to worry about it, save for loading on new music as new CDs are purchased.
I will agree that the UI on the archos isn't the most lucid, but it works well enough. I don't think this is as strong of an argument on this board since I'm sure that most of the linux users here didn't stop using linux just because of a less-than-perfect UI.
IMO, the cost of the iPod is still too high when compared to devices like the Archos 20 recorder. I honestly cannot see the need for spending $200 more for a device with a smaller drive and a firewire-only interface. This is fine if you've only got an iMac and want to work with iTunes, but not so if you have other hardware that is more expandable (ie, can have a USB 2.0 card added to it). My archos works just fine under linux and win2k and if I dropped a USB 2.0 card into my aging beige G3 (which has neither USB or firewire on its motherboard), I'm sure it would work just fine there as well.
I've have a 5GB version for about six or seven months. For the first few, until I got myself a belt-clip for it, I carried the little guy in my hand most of the time.
I usually have decent coordination, but I guess there's something about having $500 of hardware in your hands that makes Nature want to mess with you. I somehow managed to trip two or three times while carrying my iPod, each while it was playing. There wasn't a skip, pop, distortion, or anything like that. When I plugged it into my iBook, it came up just fine, I could transfer files and music... In one case, I broke my fall with my hands, which put most of my body weight on one corner of the iPod. The result: a barely visible dent.
Overall, I've found my iPod to be VERY durable. The poor thing's been dropped, broken my fall, been sat on, been in my backback going to and from campus on the bus (where backpacks routinely get kicked, tripped over, etc.), and I recently even left it sitting in the glove compartment of my car for one of the hottest weekends in Houston. No problems, and no damage beyond some faint scratches. (They really should have made the thing BRUSHED aluminum! Scratches don't show up as well, and neither do fingerprints!)
Your mileage my vary, of course, but I don't consider my iPod to be very breakable.
-Ster
P.S. MacWorld did an iPod "Torture Test" in March 2002, and it held up quite well. Unfortuately, the article is not online, and I don't have that issue here right now. -S
Geez, I hate to reply to myself....
There is a project at SourceForge gathering the pieces necessary to make this work.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
get macdrive or macopener and download a copy of ephpod.
i've been ipoding in windows for months now.
(yes, i have an ibook, but itunes is horrible for managing large collections like mine. ephpod automatically translates my winamp m3u playlists.
MP3 *is* lame. The technology is quickly becoming dated, and it is unable to keep up with the increasing demand for better audio quality. It was claimed to be "near-CD quality" but anybody with ears will know that that is a pretty generous comment.
Several companies have (closed) audio standards that sound much better than mp3 at lower bit rates. Unfortunately, they are secret or covered by patents.
Ogg Vorbis at 128kbit sounds better than MP3 at 128kbit, in my opinion, but that is debatable.
Ogg at 192kbit will sound better than MP3 at *any* bitrate.
Just because many people use MP3s doesn't mean we can't migrate to a new, better standard.
Remember that NTSC was a *hack* to get color TV to fit into the alloted black and white bandwidth. Now that black and white broadcast television is long obsolete, we are desperately in need of a new television standard. HDTV is taking a long time in coming.
The internal combustion engine is easy to engineer but it is horribly inefficient. External combustion engines (such as the Stirling Engine) are way more efficient and I believe we will begin to see them in the future. The Segway people have several working prototypes.
Basically, what makes something a "de-facto" standard is the fact that people use it. If you don't like it, don't use it and convince others to go with your standard. When you are encoding your own audio (from CD) and playing it on your own player, who cares what standard you use. If you want to use Ogg, use it, and let the player manufacturers know you want support for it. For those of you who will cry when MP3 is replaced by something better, deal with it. Go home and listen to your 8 tracks.
Personally, I am going to buy an iPod and investigate porting Ogg Vorbis to it. In the open source world sometimes if you want something you have to write it yourself.
c) has a particularly inefficient and inflexible filesystem
That's right, you can move files around on a Mac because most file references are to the file and not it's path!
One of the benefits of metadata; the file name, the file path, and all the file attributes are aspects of a file that can change without affecting the file itself. Very useful and worth more than just a piracy tool.
GPL Deconstructed
It helps if you're playing with facts rather than a bunch of crap which isn't accurate.
1. No, the battery isn't replacable by the user. But it holds a 10 hour charge quite admirably, and it's a long-life Lithium-based battery. By the tame you would need to replace the battery, you wouldn't be using the iPod you have now anymore.
2. Of course you have to send it to Apple for a battery replacement. It's a special battery built just for Apple. However, it is trivial to dissassemble the pod and remove/replace parts.
3. 90 day warranty is accurate. However, you can obtain a very cheap 2 year warranty from many brick-and-mortars selling it, Apple has been known to support it past the warranty, and many credit cards will double your warranty time.
4. I've dropped my iPod 5 times. It still functions, and it isn't any worse for wear. The things are built to be solid, which is why...
5. Solid state doesn't matter. First of all, 5 or 10 gigs in solid state would be ungodly expensive. Beyond that, though, the iPod *IS* solid state when it's playing! Unless your song exceeds half an hour, the hard drive comes on only long enough to copy it into the iPod's RAM, then shuts back down. There are no "moving parts" to worry about for most songs. On top of that, the drive used in the iPod is one of the smallest and most rugged drives on the market.
The iPaq battery definitely does not last as long as the one the iPod has, considering the iPod was made specifically for music. Also, the iPod's interface is probably 10x better then any MP3 player out for the iPaq. If someone is looking to just carry music around with them, then I would suggest the iPod over the iPaq. And also, the iPaq (last time I checked) connected to the PC using USB! (1.1, no less), so you're downloading the files to the iPaq 30 times slower than you would with the iPod.
In other words, you're wrong.
blog & fiction: jd87
dalamcd
moer liek CELtroid prime!!@1!
Unless the Archos does something that much better than iPod and has better marketing, iPod might have market share on mp3 players. If that is true, iPod support goes up, so does support and development. And the ball starts to roll..
:)
Not to say that there won't be a killer product released by someone else. I'm just stating what I perceive to be the current state of affairs.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
although there's always something coming a few months away ;)
the PJB300 (next generation of the PJB100, the first ever harddrive-based mp3 player) should be out during 3rd quarter of this year. its featurelist is unreleased, but the first one has:
40G harddrive (60G soon!)
smaller than nomad jukebox
12 hour battery life
open source SDK (and good linux support)
and that came out 2.5 years ago!
so there's a fair amount of clamouring over what the new one will do. suffice to say it should (and will have to) kick the ipod's ass.
fross
It's $299 in the clearance section of their online store. If you're an Apple customer, you've got their $25 Macworld's-coming coupon, so it's $274.
Not too shabby for what's widely regarded as the best mp3 player.
Lies about crimes
mp3 codecs are written/available with integer-based decoding, whereas ogg requires floating point operation.
hence portable mp3 players, with the eye on cost and efficiency, usually only have integer-based chippery for decoding. (excuse the vague terms, running out of my technical arena here...) and hence can't run Ogg.
i know there are "wrapper layers" to allow floating point operation on integer-based platforms, but these have not caught on, maybe they require even more horsepower that these chips can't supply? again, there's no reason for them to use more powerful chips than needed to support mp3...
personally i'd love to see ogg support, i think it's a great codec. but to the rest of those in this thread saying "mp3 sucks, ogg rocks!" - it's all subjective. high bitrate mp3s (256-320kbps) sound as good as the source. no question. ogg probably does at lower bitrates (192?). but they can both perform to as high quality as the human ear needs, it's just a matter of efficiency.
Fross
you can't backup mp3s to your hard drive, a BIG downside. Personally i prefer ephpod, it seems to offer much more control.
Childish of me, but I have to revive a discussion that occurred back when the iPod was released. I posted here wondering why Apple insisted on depriving the iPod of 90% of the potential market by using a proprietary file system. Got a lot of flames in response, the gist of was, "Because, stupid, the purpose of iPods is to sell Macs. You don't think they can sell that thing for $400 and make a profit do you?!!!"
... in which EVERY program requires an installer to scatter bits of it across far-flung parts of your HD, tweak a million registry keys, and optionally install one or more spyware/adware packages.
Now, on Mac OS X on the other hand, it's a simple matter to copy a program - well-behaved programs keep all their data inside the app bundle itself, meaning you have to copy exactly one file to your iPod.
And remember, Windows folks - you may have an iPod, but you still don't have iMovie or iDVD! (iPhoto is really a bastard child of all the quickie photo-album makers of the world, with a few whizzy features tossed in)
Save time now so you can waste it later
Not. Most of the time my VCR can't acquire a signal at all. When it does, half the time it's from a cable station the wrong time zone, so the clock gets set one or two hours off. I set the damn thing by hand.
XPlay eh? Following the well know naming of programs for the X Window System since X10 was around.
But seriously, people in the computer industry who should know better seem to be appropriating names that imply their products have a pedigree that they haven't.
Witness Microsoft's appropriation of "X" after having tried to appropriate the generic "Windows" they now have ActiveX, DirectX, Xbox - truly an homage to the hugely successful X Window System.
And Apple are no better, they called their latest operating system X. And have now launched a server version called "Xserve" (frighteningly close to "Xserver") and a version of the iMac called "emac" - what's next "Linu"? "Mozill"? "Apach"? "gre"?
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
Actually... Steve never said it wouldn't be made to work with Windows. He just said that Apple doesn't care about Windows...
WinPoding forum at Ipoding.com
Apple Ipod Forums
Ipodhacks
IpodLounge forumss at IpodLounge.com
Everything Ipod-accessories
I assume none of the Windows-based solutions have any means to update the firmware of the iPod itself, which is too bad. But maybe these folks can go the their local Apple Store and ask one of the Geniuses(TM) to take care of it...?
-- thinkyhead software and media
Why would anyone thinking of themselves as a true computer geek/whizard/hacker/ whatever even consider buying a lame overpriced closed technology device? It's just plain unkewl! You're supporting an evil corporation! There a hard-drive based mp3 players out there that you can open without loosing the warranty! Try doing that to Ipad! There's a project at http://bjorn.haxx.se/rockbox/ to write an open source OS for the Archos mp3 player. And my favourite neo 25 is currently available for 50$- if you know where to find it :)
Jam a 20gig laptop hard drive in there, and you're ready to go for a loong time.
Use it as a portable hard drive, too.USB connected and not needing a driver. Works with *nix. Other OS are supported too.
Or consider making an mp3 player of your own -
there are kits out there.
Beautiful design, HORRIBLY engineered.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Come on. Does anyone actually think the Gigabeat is only going to be $8-$50 (depending on whom you believe) cheaper for less hardware? lets get real. That would be the most assnine marketing mistake in the world and most companies don't get to Toshiba's size with those kind of mistakes. Granted, there's always a first... But until somebody can quote me a real "I have it in stock right now" price, PLEASE give it a rest. I know everybody here has name brand loyalties, but jeez...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Mark
Don't worry, the comments are still microsoft bashing no matter the topic ;)
The only thing worse than a Microsoft Troll is a Microsoft troll who doesn't know what "irony" means.
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Do you work for Apple? If not you are lying. Apple is the only people that can work on it. Technicians that don't work directly for Apple can do nothing without voiding the warrenty.
I still don't get it... what's so great about the iTools... you have iMovie, which is just like Windows Movie Maker or Ulead Video Studio or any other movie creation app that gets bundled with video-capable hardware... you get iPhoto, which is nothing special, I'm not even sure what iDVD is, if it's just a DVD player I can't imagine why that's special, and then the much-lauded iTunes, which to me seems exactly like musicmatch jukebox, (which comes with everything) though I still prefer Winamp for all my audio needs... really, what's so "killer" about these apps? They seem pretty commonplace to me.
Whoever on earth said that Macs suck is like totally messed up. Macs are easier to use, Windoze-based machines are like being in hell I'm only a geek with more than a decade of experience with computers but I can tell you this: Microsoft has ruined my life. I grew up using Macs and when I got my first Windwoes computer, I was devastated. What happened to the ease of use, the wonderful GUI? Anyway, get an iPod right now. You'll never regret it, no matter what. In fact, get an iMac or a G4! You'll realize that they are much better. XPlay and the iPod with a Windoze computer is not the way to go-unless you absolutely want to do that.