So after a year of Pelican OT bashing the iPod karma bites me in the ass big time...
The top item of my 10 year old son's Christmas wish list is a new iPod Nano. Not a mp3 player...an iPod, preferably in black, cause they are the bomb!!
So I shuffle (no pun intended) into the Costco and walk out with a silver (second choice) 2GB model. Hey, if my Sony walkman was good enough for me in high school than 500 songs on a digital player is fine for a 10 year old.
So on Christmas night I'm trying to get the glorious iPod up and running for Christmas morning. I download the latest iTunes and install. I connect the iPod via USB to our home PC and, of course, no dice. No drivers, malfunctioning USB device error message. No love from iTunes. Reinstall iTunes and try again. No dice. Consult the iTunes help forums. Repeat 3 times - now O'Dark thirty.
After the third re-install iTunes see's the iPod. HORRAY!!! By default iTunes has all 12GB of my music checked for iPod synch so that fails after 5 mintues of loading. Disonnect iPod and restart iTunes. CTRL-A (thanks for that) all songs and uncheck the synch box. Then plug in iPod. Sync made no problems...there is a God.
Start checking the songs my son wants, all heavy metal, absolutely no Country, and click the iPod icon. iTunes freezes as does the iPod. After 1 hour I uplug iPod and do a reset. Restart the dead iTunes and re-sync. All is good again.
Kids are up in a couple hours so lets make sure all is good. Hit the Sync icon again and all hell breaks loose. Repeat my last steps and fall into bed for a quick 2 hours of sleep B4 kids wake to Santa's gifts.
Since then I have been unable to get iTunes to sync to the iPod w/o a complete restart. It only works the first time up. If I try to resync a second time both iTunes and iPod are very unhappy. So much for that vaunted Apple software...