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No WMA for HP iPod
finelinebob writes "In spite of Paul Thurrott's wishful thinking, Wired is reporting that HP will not support the WMA format in its version of the iPod. From the article, according to HP spokesperson Muffi Ghadial, "'We're not going to be supporting WMA for now ... We picked the service that was the most popular (Apple's iTunes Music Store). We could have chosen another format, but that would have created more confusion for our customers.' He added, 'Most customers don't care about the format they're downloading.'" Thurrott's singing a different tune lately, anyway...."
I have personally witnessed Apple replacing lost downloads due to a hardware failure (hd crash). They do keep records.
I use my iPod with Linux, and have for over a year. In fact, it has never been used with any other operating system, and I have never used iTunes or Musicmatch (or whatever the windows thing is called) so I can't really compare.
Linux firewire support is experimental in 2.4, so getting it working requires your basic linux skills, but I haven't had any real problems. Most firewire cards and MBs use a standard driver, so it is just to compile the modules (and firewire harddisk support) and run. I have never gotten automatic hotplug support working here, but scanning the scsi bus manually isn't that big a deal (and others apparently have). With kernels before 2.4.20 I had a recurring hard lockup while transfering, which was annoying, but that is gone now. And I don't think the drivers are completely optimal so the transfers are slower then advertised (but still many times faster than USB).
I don't know if it is better with the new iPods that support USB2.0, since I have an old firewire only model. And I haven't tried the 2.6 kernel which is supposed to have better firewire support.
The best software for adding and removing music that I have found is gtkpod. It is a nice, easy to use, GUI program that allows you to select music, construct playlists, etc. The page also contains information for getting all the other stuff working.
I am happy with my iPod on Linux.
Yeah, it could be done as a firmware update, if Apple needed it. iPod is based around the PortalPlayer PP5002 controller chip, and WMA is one of the codecs that PP's reference firmware already supports. There are other questions, of course, like which iPod models would have enough available memory to make use of yet another codec and so on.