iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

emmastory writes "When I mentioned this book to some of my friends, the response was usually either 'Doesn't the iPod come with a manual?' or 'Does the iPod even need a manual?' There is, in fact, a little CD-sized booklet that comes with the iPod, and it's true that you probably don't need much more than that if all you need to know is how to turn the thing on and play a song. But one of the great things about the Missing Manuals series is that while they tell you everything a manual ought to, they also tell you an awful lot that a manual never would." Read on for the rest of emmastory's review of iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Second Edition. iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Second Edition author J.D. Biersdorfer pages 349 publisher Pogue Press/O'Reilly rating 9 reviewer Emma Story ISBN 0596006586 summary An inexpensive way to get the most out of your iPod

For example, if you ask someone (like an Apple store employee) how to get MP3s off of an iPod and onto a computer, they'll tell you that the transfer is only supposed to go the other way. The idea is that you're not supposed to be able to just collect the entire music libraries of anyone who happens to drop by your home with his or her iPod. Of course, it turns out that there are plenty of legitimate scenarios in which you might want to be able to get your own music off of your MP3 player. (I certainly intend to rescue my music from my iPod should the external drive that's currently holding my files ever give up the ghost.) The Missing Manual, on the other hand, devotes several pages to detailing the various ways you can go about accomplishing the unspeakable act of iPod-to-computer copying.

And additional content isn't the only thing you'll find in this book -- there's also a significant difference in the depth and helpfulness of the respective texts. I'll compare their coverage of a common question among new iPod owners: what's going on when the iPod screen always says "Do not disconnect"? Here's the answer as given by the iPod User Guide:

Important: If it is not safe to disconnect iPod, a message on the iPod screen says "Do not disconnect." Don't disconnect iPod if you see this message. You could damage files on iPod. If you see the "Do not disconnect" message, you must eject iPod (see page 22) before disconnecting it.

Apple's apparent fear of possessives and articles aside, this is pretty much as bare-bones as you can get. It tells you one thing you can do if you're seeing this message, but not why it's happening, or what to do if ejecting the iPod doesn't make it go away. Here's an answer to the same question in the Missing Manual:

If you've turned on the "Enable disk use" box in iTunes' iPod Preferences panel, the "Do Not Disconnect" message appears on the iPod at all times. You have to unmount the iPod from the computer manually to make it go away (see page 215).

Even if you haven't set up the iPod to work as a FireWire disk, its hard drive may not have spun down properly. If it's stuck in a loop, the "Do Not Disconnect" message may also appear. Try clicking the Eject iPod button in iTunes, or dragging the iPod icon on the desktop to the Mac's Trash, to see if you get the "OK to Disconnect" message. If that doesn't work, try resetting the iPod as described on page 46 and then try ejecting it.

Note: If you live in a cross-platform household and have both Macintosh- and Windows-flavor iPods lying around, make sure you're plugging the WinPod into the PC. Macs are generally friendly towards PC-formatted 'Pods, but not vice versa. Mixing them up can lead to several error messages, including the "Do Not Disconnect" message (even as the computer won't mount or recognize the iPod) and the "This iPod is linked to another Music Library" message.

(Note that I plucked that answer from the iTunes troubleshooting section - there's also a similar response in the MusicMatch section.) I don't know about you, but this strikes me as infinitely more useful and enlightening than the User Guide's response (no offense to Apple's technical writers intended). And of course there are questions answered in the book that aren't addressed at all in the User Guide, nor on Apple's site.

There are plenty of other things that you'll find in this book that you might not already know, and that you certainly won't find in the included booklet - like information about the iPod on Linux Project, or descriptions of a number of different shareware and freeware programs you can grab to enhance your iPod. You'll find tricks to extend your battery life, ways to make the 'Pod behave even more like a PDA than it does by default, and how to boot off of your iPod should the need arise. Of course, it's true that you can find a lot of this on the web by yourself without having to pay for a book, so part of your decision about buying it will depend on whether you care more about spending $24.95 or saving yourself some time.

If you're wondering whether it's worth buying if you don't use Mac OS or if you have an older iPod, rest assured - coverage of all the different iPods is included, and there's material on both versions of iTunes, as well as MusicMatch for Windows. There's not a whole lot about using an iPod with a *nix box, although the topic isn't completely ignored (as you might expect). There's enough about the iPod itself that Linux users wouldn't be making a mistake to pick it up. On the other hand, it's probably not worth buying if you don't have an iPod and are just curious about iTunes. But iTunes is covered in almost every general Mac book out there, so you're not totally out of luck if that's the case. For most iPod owners, though, this book is a great and inexpensive way to get the most out of your new best friend (as long as your new best friend happens to be an iPod).

You can purchase iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Second Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Worth it?

[Sheetrock]

While the iPos looks nice, and admittedly has the best interface of all the MP3 players (owing to the simple design Macintosh has become a master of), is it worth dropping a couple hundred on it?

I've heard of two design flaws now -- both of which they seem less than inclined to fix beyond a short period of ownership -- and have noticed that PDAs in a similar price range can do MP3, video, and even word processing. If it was reliable I'd buy one tomorrow, but are they yet?

Re:Worth it?

[merikus]

I have a 1st Gen iPod.

About a year and a half ago, I was in a major accident involving slipping off a road and flipping down an embankment about six times. Myself and all the other passengers in the car were injured from the accident.

The next day I went back to take pictures and find my iPod. I found it about 10 feet from the car, buried in the snow. I pressed play and it worked; it still works to this day.

If that isn't rugged, I don't know what is.

Geeking...

[lacrymology.com]

Ahhhh, how I yearn for the day when hardware came with code snippets, bound manuals, 3d-glasses, etc... If I recall, my first system (c64) came with the computer's schematics!

-m

Re:Retreiving MP3 files off the iPod

[egg_green]

What I've never been able to find out is how to recover data such as ratings and playcounts from the 'pod. I lost my harddrive back in February, and I STILL haven't re-rated all of my music!

Any tips?

I am thinking about buying an iPod.

[Senator Bozo]

Are they really so complicated that I have to buy an extra manual from a 3rd party? Normally Apple's products have a reputation of being easy to use.

flamebait, with a kernel of truth.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I suppose most of the "missing manuals" are worthless, except maybe winxp considering the lack of a useful manual. But if you have to read a book to figure out a system or device that is supposedly the easiest to figure out... then you aren't the steriotypical slashdot reader. I guess it would be hypocritical, if Apple was the publisher of the missing manuals. But they aren't. The more functional a device is the more difficult it is going to be to learn how to use all of its functions( hey did i just make that up? I haven't heard that before, maybe i need to get out more. Or just maybe i have discovered newton's law of functionality! ALL HAIL my obvious statement put into law form!!).

Re:flamebait, with a kernel of truth.

[bcrowell]

I suppose most of the "missing manuals" are worthless, except maybe winxp considering the lack of a useful manual.
The Apple manual is indeed pathetic.

But if you have to read a book to figure out a system or device that is supposedly the easiest to figure out... then you aren't the steriotypical slashdot reader.
I guess I'm not the stereotypical Slashdot reader, but I thought the iPod was extremely difficult to figure out. For instance, it may have seemed obvious to Apple how to use the circular menu selection gizmo, but it wasn't obvious to me, and the documentation didn't explain it. I spent a lot of time trying to get the menu selection to move up and down by pressing the top and bottom of the gizmo, which didn't work. It may sound silly, but I don't see why they expect users to intuit an entirely new metaphor that they've never seen before. Since when is it obvious that a line on the screen maps to a circle on the touchpad? But that was just one of many hassles I had my first afternoon with the iPod. Personally, I think emacs was a lot easier to learn than the iPod's user interface.

If you read Apple's forums, you'll also find that there have been a lot of hardware problems, as well as lot of nasty problems caused by buggy software updates.

My wife loves the thing, but I guess I failed to bond with it. I've also gotten spoiled by open source -- it feels really yukky to go back to using a completely proprietary system.

Kudos to the missing manual line...

[phearlez]

... for pricing their books according to their worth and utility, rather than weight. This one, according to B&N, is a full 350 pages - a decent sized book. Despite that, it's a (comparitively?) reasonable $25. I can't count the number of books I've sat in Borders with a cup of coffee and read rather than purchased because it wasn't worth $40 for the chapter that I really needed.

Other things you can do with iTunes

[tobes]

Ok, time for some shameless self promotion.

If you have iTunes check out Musicmobs. You can upload your XML file or sync your iTunes stats via an open source Cocoa application called Mobster.

It will give you a profile of what you listen to, suggest new music, show you people that have similar tastes as you, and show you related artists for all of your bands.

It's growing fast so get in now to get a low userid :)

iPod Programming?

[flyinbutrs]

I've been wondering this for a while, and this article seemed like a good place to pose the question. Is there any way to program plugins for iPod's interface? I've done a fair amount of research through google and iPod message boards, and have found precisely zilch about how to code programs for iPod. Is it possible?

Cheap alternative

[Jaycatt]

If you're not using it for jogging, you could also look into getting an inexpensive MP3 CD player. Bring along 6 CD-R's of your favorite tunes and you've got quite a bit of storage. A $50 one I got works great in the car and never skips. Runs quite a while on the 2 AA batteries too (and it's pretty easy to throw an extra pair in wherever I'm going). Don't think it would work well for jogging, though. After a year of that, I finally broke down and got a car MP3 player, but I still use the portable player to take to parties, etc, along with a cable to patch it into friends' audio systems.

If you like ephod try sharepod

[jomas1]

Ephod has to be installed for you to retrieve mp3s and while that may not be a big deal on your home computer you may want to try sharepod which allows you to copy songs from your ipod to your computer without any installation. Useful when dealing with someone else's computer. Here's a link:
Sharepod.
Here's a quote from the page:
" wrote this program because none of my friends have an iPod, so of course don't have Ephpod/iTunes or similar installed on their computers. With SharePod, nothing needs to be installed, the program is stored and run from your iPod. All you need to do is plug your iPod into a computer and run SharePod.exe SharePod reads your iPod database and allows you to extract music files to your hard drive, either individually or by playlist. You can also create Winamp playlists from the music on your iPod so you can listen to it without needing to copy the mp3 files to your computer. If you are on a network, (e.g. at work/university) and you share the iPod drive on the network, other users can run your copy of SharePod from their own computers, and download music directly from your iPod! This allows P2P type music sharing just by plugging in your iPod :) There are several programs out there which do these things and more, but are required to be installed on each computer first, or require large supporting files to be downloaded, which is a pain when round at a friends house. VB source code is also available"