Everyone loves the <a href=http://www.apple.com/ca/ipodmini>iPod</a>. <p> For a Mac user, this is a natural player to get - it integrates well with the system, iTunes looks and feels like a Mac app, and it probably works great (I don't have a Mac but from what I've read, this is the case).<p> If you're a Windows user, however, then the only reason to buy an iPod is because you like the look of it. <p> It's finicky about it's USB connection, doesn't sync with Windows Media Player, and iTunes is very much a Mac app looking like a fish out of water running on a PC.<p> For example, apparently the Macintosh calls delete "Clear". I right-click on a playlist and I want to delete it - every other Windows program calls the option to delete it "Delete", but iTunes calls it "Clear". This is probably intuitive if you're a Mac user where (probably) every app calls this function "Clear", but on a PC, it's "Delete". For a while I thought you couldn't delete a playlist, since I expected that Clear would leave it there but remove all the songs from it.<p> You can open the iPod as a drive and drop MP3s onto it, but apparently unless you do this with iTunes, the player doesn't recognize them. Again every other MP3 player lets you do this; but not the iPod. I guess they really want you using iTunes. Makes sense, since Apple gets their revenue from the music store, but I'm in Canada, where we can't use the Apple music store. I don't want to use iTunes.<p> I'm trying to get <a href=http://www.mediafour.com/products/xplay/>XPlay</a> to work well; so far I'm having mixed luck. I'll post when I figure out whether it works well or not.Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:17:07 GMT