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New iPod Owner Onslaught Overwhelms iTunes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the drowning-in-white-plastic dept.

Billosaur writes "In the post-Christmas rush to power up and use their new iPods, an onslaught of downloaders brought iTunes to its knees, according to CNN. Monday and Tuesday saw users posting message after message about slow downloads and the iTunes site denying them entry. The heavy traffic was apparently more than the system could bear, what with the large numbers of people receiving iPods and iTunes gift cards. Perhaps Apple was underestimating just how successful they were going to be?"

6 of 395 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Apple and iPod... by geekboybt · · Score: 3, Informative

    Best competition? There's stuff from Sandisk and Creative, as well as Microsoft's Zune. But none of them have the marketshare of the iPod, or the vast amount of accessories. Whether or not the store is "as populated with songs as they say it is" is really a matter of opinion. It suits my needs, but mine may not be the same as yours. You're free to install iTunes and browse the store anonymously (without creating an account) for free. You can even preview the 30 second clips without an account, though the system will nag you every 4th or 5th preview to log in. If money's a factor, you can always go the route I did - go to the Apple Store online and look in their refurb section. Everything on there is backed by the same warranty as the new stuff. They used to have (and may still have) first gen (black/white) 2Gb nanos for $99, for example.

  2. Re:Oh goody! by croddy · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

  3. Re:Yes by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Depends on what you mean by better. I don't care about video, but I do care about size. The direct competitor for the iPod from Creative seems to be the Zen Vision M (their product line-up seems quite confusing, so I might have missed something). It is about 50% bigger by volume than the iPod.

    Oh, and for the record, DivX is a specific implementation of MPEG-4. The iPod also plays MPEG-4, including MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) which gives much higher quality for the same bit-rate (look for anything encoded with X.264; there's a lot of it floating around).

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. Re:Or maybe it was Taiwan being offline by kalidasa · · Score: 3, Informative

    Good thought, but I doubt it. I had no problems browsing, and just slowdowns adding to my cart, but when I tried to redeem a gift card, iTunes threw some kind of error that looked more like an overloaded server error than a comm error.

  5. Re:First Post! by compm375 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Stuff by COWON America is pretty good. They support a whole lot of audio formats, such as mp3, wav, flac, ogg vorbis, and wma (including DRMed, though it requires a firmware update on all but their newest player). I just got an iAudio x5l, and I am quite impressed by it, especially the 35hr. battery life. The only downside as far as I'm concerned is the video, which is only 160x128 xvid at a bitrate of about 256kb/s, but they have a model specifically for video playing called the A2.

  6. Re:Yes by nsayer · · Score: 3, Informative
    Especially if you want to play videos in a format people actually use (divx).



    Hilarious.



    The only digital video format that could reasonably be described as a format "people" (i.e., a non-trivially-small fraction of them) use would probably be MPEG2 (as in ATSC & DVD). After that probably comes all of the flash being watched by YouTubers.