Perhaps I’m a Luddite, but I’ll probably be the last person on Earth to own an iPod or an iPhone. I realize there’s an entire generation of people with white ear buds practically surgically attached to their ears, but I haven’t bought into the iPod or the iPhone for a whole number of reasons.
First and foremost, I’m a busy guy and I don’t have a hell of a lot of time to sit on iTunes and download music. Don’t get me wrong, I love music, but my playlist comes from decades past — ’60s and ’70s hard rock, funk and disco, with some ’80s and early ’90s alternative in the rotation — and a mix of jazz and classical, so a lot of the new crap out there is totally lost on me. I also have no huge interest in converting my CD collection to the proprietary format of the iPod. Why, I’m perfectly happy listening to my carís Sirius satellite radio, letting disc jockeys tantalize my ears. In my honest opinion, iTunes is a badly architected piece of junk: it’s bloated and crash-prone, especially on Windows.
If you’re a music fan and a Linux user, you’re totally at the mercy of the Open Source community, albeit with solutions that work fairly well, such as Banshee and Amarok. However, no open source solution is supported by Apple. If you don’t own a Mac but own an iPod or an iPhone, you’re pretty much a second- or third-class citizen. I…
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