This is an interesting article from a current iPod owner on why he will switch to a Zune when microsoft releases the device.
What I find most amusing about this, is that a lot of his complaints are a large portion of why I chose not to buy another Sony music player. SonicStage had all of the same problems that this guy complains about with iTunes. It was cumbersome, image heavy, took forever to convert things and periodically, for whatever random reason, chose to delete files from my music collection when I would burn them to minidisc. It was never a whole album either, and never all of the songs that I’d transferred onto one particular disc in one sitting, so I wouldn’t call it a user error. Also, when my hard drive went belly up, I had no way to get those songs back off of the minidisc and onto my hard drive again.
What I quickly found out, is that this is simply life living with tunes that have been crippled with DRM. This is not what I want as a consumer. I want the ability to put it on my player, take it back off and not lose the music that I’ve paid for. My solution to the SonicStage problem was to buy hard copies, rip them and then transfer them to my player. This way I am guaranteed that I won’t lose my entire music collection from a single hard drive failure, and have the ability to restore the music– that I paid to have the right to listen to– on that machine.
Also, he’s right, it’s cheaper to buy CDs, particularly when your music tastes tend to not include Ashlee Simpson or Christina Aguilera. I’m not a pop music kind of girl. I stopped being a pop music kind of girl when I was 12. Can we please grow up the available music selection to things that stretch outside of American pop culture? I know this stuff sells, but the other stuff will sell too and how hard would it be to carry the more obscure tunes realistically when each one only takes up a few megabytes of hard drive space? I’m not expecting iTunes to carry j-pop, but it would be nice to be able to find something that doesn’t make me feel the need to crack my gum when I listen to it.
