11.24.2007

More mp3 player Drama

So I thought all my issues with my Creative Zen Xtra were over. But I've spent the better part of today trying to reload all the music back onto my player. It was going pretty well until the player's hard drive gets half full. At that point, Vista doesn't want to have anything to do with it anymore. It's done and that's that. After a few hours of banging my head against a wall, I fired up the old XP computer. Same issue. Since installing the new firmware, the player acts very differently. So right now I'm creating a mirror folder with all the wma files I tried uploading. I'm going to pare that down to what I believe my player will hold. It's still about 6000 songs, but it seems crazy that I have to dump almost that many just to use my (until yesterday) perfectly good mp3 player. I think it's time to bite the bullet and get a new iPod. I've got a teeny little 2 gig right now. I think I'm going to splurge and get an 80 gig.

To anyone reading this who is running Vista, have you had any compatibility issues with Vista and your iPod? Please let me know. The only reason I ask is Ken just called Apple to ask that very question and the woman on the other end of the line said that Apple hasn't run any tests to see if iPods will work with Vista. What?

I'm irritated and should have been in bed two hours ago with my nice new stack of comics. I took Wednesday and Friday off from work to have a restful, relaxing, calm 5 day weekend and so far it's turned out to be a big pile of shit. Except tonight when I completely blew my diet by going to Pizza Slut. First time I've had pizza since July (you know I must be on a diet if I can remember the last time I ate pizza!!)

3 comments:

Taylor The Latte Boy said...

Hey Walt

The iPod situation with VISTA isn't much better.

I just got the 160gb last week. Since I plugged it into the computer, iTunes has been super screwy. I have pretty much lost all of my playlists, podcast subscriptions and 90% of my music has disappeared from the library. (Music is still on the hard drive, but it doesn't show up on iTunes) Oh, and while pictures come up on the thumbnails in folders, they don't always come up when you try and look at them - just a black screen. I took the iPod back to Best Buy and exchanged it, thinking that it was a hardware problem. When the new iPod did the same thing, I realize it was a VISTA thing.

My computer has been working overtime for over 12 hours now retransferring music into the AAC format (apparently 2000 of my songs that had worked on the old iPod are no longer able to work on this one, so I will have multiple versions of music on my hard drive til I clean house one night when I am SUPER bored.)

Taffy mentioned to me she saw an article about VISTA and how people are going back to XP and how they are finding that VISTA is "eating" files due to glitches, and that apparently one of the major factors of this is if you have iTunes on your computer. (I have no idea where she saw this).

So, whatever you do, please know you have someone comiserating with you.

OK, off to bed - going to see Michael perform at Animal Kingdom tomorrow - woo hoo!

mr-internet said...

Per my blog on this subject @ http://mrinternet.wordpress.com/2007/03/10/creative-zen-nx-and-vista-working-together-finally/


It should be even easier for you as the Xtra uses playforsure software from creative (my zen nx does not unfortunately.
This means it works with vista even better. Even if you ignore the playfor sure bit if you download all the drivers for xtra on the creative site and install them all on vista (it will make you do it in certain orders, eventually you will get it to work. Or read my instructions they work 100%...Good luck


http://au.creative.com/support/downloads/download.asp?MainCategory=213&nRegionFK=&nCountryFK=&nLanguageFK=&sOSName=Windows+XP®ion=2&Product_Name=ZEN+Xtra&Product_ID=9288&modelnumber=&driverlang=1033&OS=10&drivertype=0&x=29&y=14

Nessa said...

Walt, I have vista and a lot of what Taylor said is accurate. My subscriptions to pod casts have randomly stopped, I would say that every two weeks, My computer wants to re-load my library like I had just installed iTunes. I just uncheck the convert files buttons when the pop up comes up. If you don't, you will have doubles of all of your songs. (Like Taylor is experiencing) I only have 2,000 songs, but I have a lot of versions of some songs so it was a pain in the ass to delete all the extra ones.

Also, I got a pop up saying there is a known problem with Vista and itunes. Something to the fact that you need to physically eject your iPod before you unplug it or your music will disappear. That's not verbatum, but it was something like that.

Good Luck Walt! Sorry if none of that made sense, i mean it is 5:15 am :P