Traygon

All this talk of one set of fan boys arguing against another since the beginning of time is just starting to get irritating, especially when both sides are completely wrong. Is Microsoft better? No. Is Apple superior? No. Let me explain the day I have had with trouble from both sides, pathetic problems that shouldn’t even be present.

Windows 7

Okay, so this Operating System is okay, apart from the fact that I received four BSOD’s (Blue Screen of Death) yesturday and today it seems to want to keep bugging me to restart my machine and install updates, which of course… fail. When I do have a chance to actually do something on the machine I get notifications of files being ready to burn to a disc. I haven’t copied any files to be burned to a blank CD and when I go the built-in burning feature (which is crap in itself), it’s blank!

Windows Media Player

I don’t know who oversees the development over at MHQ, but this person must have been either stoned or pissed out their face when he or she approved and released this bad boy into the world. Not only has it got a ridiculous interface, terrible track sorting and not being able to have your songs in a nice tight list is just beyond belief. Importing music? No problem… wait! Where is the import feature? Oh so I need to go and select a destination for music to be automatically updated? Sounds good to me! I’ll leave it there for 5 minutes to update the library.

Come back 15 minutes later and still no songs listed. Nothing has been imported. So not only can iCrap and Songbird view, play and import all songs from my music folder, WMP decides to ignore it all. Fantastic, without a manual import feature, this software is useless to me.

XBOX 360

A great entertainment centre, fantastic selection of games, online play is brilliant and I’m overall pleased with what I can get out of the system. I was also really excited in transferring all my songs (or streaming) onto the 360 from my computer. The one thing that baffles me to hell and back is the fact that there is no standard import feature to directly save .mp3 (or other format) songs to the hard drive, it’s just the same as burning songs onto a disc and importing. Except it’s quicker, it might actually pick up the track names and Artists and you don’t have to buy 50 blank audio CD’s to get music playable on your console.

I will of course try and use my iPod in a minute to play music off there, see if it’s any better than streaming (it has to be!). Going onto streaming between my PC and 360, there is one huge problem – My router is downstairs, both my computer and the console is on wireless with mediocre signal levels. Also, I don’t really like wasting electricity with having two systems running when I should only need one.

iTunes

I think iTunes is almost as bad as WMP, it’s slowly getting there anyway. Ready to sync all my music onto my iPod to prepare to play it on the 360. I was thinking on converting all the .mp3 tracks to AAC to try and keep everything happy when the 360 tries to read the songs off the player. Only selected a thousand songs to convert, started off nicely and then an error occurred! Now I have half my songs duplicated and half in .mp3 format, fantastic. Thanks iTunes, can I not continue to convert the remaining songs? Nope, seems that I have overused the conversion facility as it no longer works for any song whatsoever. At this point, I am almost prepared to climb up on top of the house and jump.

iPod

My most hated loved media player! Although I tend to use the iPhone, the iPod does have it’s uses, that’s if it decides to work. Can’t really say anything more than that, only the fact that having to reset it to factory settings almost 4 times a week becomes slightly annoying.

Working! I have just plugged my iPod into the 360 and can read and play all my tracks, super! All I need to happen is Songbird to be able to take over the world and slah down iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Tags Apple, blogging, fail, iPod, Microsoft, Songbird, windows 7, xbox360