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Is the iPhone's iPod feature perfect?

#15 User is offline   cphoffman42 Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 02:52 PM

Not sure if the feature is missing or I just didn't figure out how to use it, but I've had trouble rating songs playing on my iPhone. It's pretty intuitive on the iPod. I'm sure there has to be some way to do this, but I haven't really put the effort into figuring it out, since I still mostly use my iPod Classic.
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#16 User is offline   Plan_K Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 02:58 PM

I really love the click wheel iPod for scrubbing through long audio tracks. I can do this without looking at the device. Scrubbing through long audio tracks with any precision on the current iPhone OS is impossible. I'm only slightly encouraged by the improvements announced for OS 3.0. It still sounds like you're going to have to look at the screen at aim at a very small target to get this to work. Here's hoping I'm wrong.
The click wheel iPod is so ideal for this kind of scrubbing that I greatly prefer a nearly 5-year-old 4G iPod with a black-and-white screen to the iPhone's iPod. I use my iPhone's iPod for audio only when the 4G iPod is syncing with iTunes (or when I want to hear an audio track at a faster speed—the iPhone's Audiobook Speed "Faster" is faster than the iPod's "Faster.")
I was hoping Apple would incorporate gestures for scrubbing audio, so it could be done largely without looking. For example, tapping on an active iPod screen, followed by a right swipe would move the audio forward 30 seconds, left swipe would go back 30 seconds. Maybe two successive swipes would forward/rewind 2 minutes, and three swipes would scrub 5 minutes either way.
I hate to sound old school, but my 5-year-old iPod is so much the right combination of feature richness and ease of accessibility to those features that to me, the iPhone's iPod is a major clunky step backwards.
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#17 User is offline   quayzar Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 03:13 PM

Are you talking about the sliding scrubber that comes on when you tab on the screen of the Now Playing item is too inaccurate or do you not know that function exists? Frankly I didn't know about it for a couple of months before I discovered it.

In any case I find the function of the sliding scrubber works well for me but your experience may vary from mine.
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#18 User is offline   reallycrazy Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 03:14 PM

The 'iPod' part of my iPod Touch SUCKS. Simply because it requires 100% of my focus to accomplish anything. Even simple things like adjusting the volume, playing/pausing or switching to the next track requires me to be physically looking at the device to hit the right spot on the screen.
I would say it's even a basic UI error that double-clicking when the screen is locked brings up the on-screen controls in a different position than when the screen is unlocked.
I wish Apple would stick the 'classic' scroll wheel controller onto the back of the iPod Touch so I can go back to keeping the Touch inside it's case while still doing simple things like play/pause/next/previous.
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#19 User is offline   musictech Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 03:17 PM

I need scrolling titles, this is particularly frustrating for classical music, I may have an album where all the titles begin as "Piano sonata No...." and thats all I can see. Its too frustrating to guess and skip around.
I would also like the ability to turn off cover flow. I never really use it, it looks nice, but thats it. I could be laying in bed, listening to music, but if I have my ipod sideways I have to use coverflow, which is made for browsing music, not for finding something specific.
There is a problem with syncing album art that needs to be fixed as well. I have a large library (over 32 GB) and whenever I sync my iPod the album art syncs incorrectly. A cover for the Beatles, for example, could be synced as a cover for a Led Zeppelin album.
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#20 User is offline   appleseeds11 Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 03:22 PM

Another vote for better cover flow. In fact, I'd love the option to simply turn it OFF. More often then not, cover flow actually gets in the way (showing albums not in the current playlist, obscuring playback controls, etc.) rather than providing extra benefit.
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#21 User is offline   kimhill Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 03:29 PM

I never use coverflow on the iPhone anyway. I end up with the iPhone horizontal on the stairmaster, and it's impossible to access iPod controls (!) until you get out of coverflow mode, which means I have to physically rotate the iPhone 90 degrees before I can even control it. This is nonsense.

Mr. Breen's comment about "On-the-go" playlists is right on. The iPhone interface for "On-the-go" playlists is a bad joke. Circuitous, confusing, horrible. There should be a touch & hold action for songs, like for saving graphics, which brings up a dialog that allows you add the song to the playlist.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the iPhone (/iPod Touch) being so amazing in general, is that its overall genius overshadows the occasional, lurking interface failure- like "On-the-go" playlists. Apple is driving the product forward aggressively, and these failures fade into the background, and become entrenched.

The iPhone was supposed to be "The best iPod ever," but it certainly is not. I could go on with more interface problems, maybe later...
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#22 User is offline   newuser1980 Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 03:30 PM

any cell phone can do these kind of based feature, and the best with other phone, is that you can change battery yourself without driving hours to find a apple center, and no need to wait a few week for the return, and you are not forced to use itune to copy song, you just drag and drop song on the icon on other phone, so that you don't need to use the latest bulky itune on slow pc or mac.

and you don't need to join any plans with other phone, with other phone like nokia, or sony, you can use extra microSD cards if the builtin memory is not large enough.

you own what you paid right? but with a iphone it never belongs to you no matter how much you paid, the problem is that after the iphone battery dead, you take the iphone for apple to replace battery, all they do is take your iphone wait for 1 week for the paper work, then they swap you another used iphone used by other people, this is why it is impossible to keep any data after they swapped your iphone.

it's 2009, the iphone only has 3 mega pixel? even my sonye820 which I bought 5 years ago has 3mp
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#23 User is offline   fractalfrog Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 03:37 PM

I'm an audio professional and as such I keep all my audio files in an uncompressed format for maximum fidelity. However, I do not need all that quality when I simply listen to some tunes on my iPhone and would prefer a compressed format in order to fit more music on the iPhone.
iTunes offer the feature to encode your music at a lower quality when you transfer music to your regular iPod but somehow this isn't possible when I sync my iPhone. Extremely annoying!!!
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#24 User is offline   iedsri Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 04:07 PM

Please, Apple, figure out a way to allow for the display of full, extra-long titles!
As a classical music listener the biggest continuing problem I face is track ID. Like most serious classical fans I know, I have to spend a lot of time renaming tracks from my CDs. Neither the iTunes Store nor the classical labels seem to know that it does no one any good to have a track called "Allegro non troppo" -- there are at least 5 million tracks named "Allegro non troppo"!
Unfortunately this means track titles need to include considerably more information than that -- and the result is that the iPhone's iPod never shows the full title of a track, even in landscape mode.
The new Voice Command feature will help a little, since presumably it will read back the full title of every track when asked -- but when you're trying to listen to music, waiting to hear that disembodied digital voice announcing titles is going to be a trial.
I humbly propose two display options be added to iPhone's software: font-size change, and changes from one to two or three lines of text per track title.
I might also suggest that iTunes Store's data entry team try getting into classical music -- maybe then they'd pay a little more attention to their (improved but still) miserable track titling!
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#25 User is offline   nom Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 04:36 PM

A very basic one (hopefully it will be there in OS 3.0) is...

Ability to set equaliser manually like in iTunes - just having pre-sets isn't enough particularly for those with specific headphones

I was amazed when told of this as I don't use my iPhone for playing music via headphones (mostly through amp which has own equaliser settings)

can't be too hard to implement on phone - can it?
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#26 User is online   byronkim Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 04:38 PM

Nope...number one my list is that they should continue working on the gesture driven interface to make it more natural and efficient. Not that they didn't do a great job out the gate, but it still feeling a bit '1.0' in certain respects. For example, I use it a lot one-handed and the 'reach' for the button on the top opposite side drives me nuts.
Also, I agree that video management throughout the whole iTunes/iPod/iPhone ecosystem is just plain terrible. It's like it's the unwanted step-child....
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#27 User is offline   Torgo Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 04:45 PM

What about those of us with more than 16 gigabytes of music (or now, 32, I guess). What should we do? At first, I tried "sync only checked songs" which seemed like a nice idea, except that then iTunes would skip all unchecked songs when I was playing from my desktop. Then I decided to use "sync only selected playlists" and I have a nice system of smart playlists to manage what songs get synced. But here's my beef. I have a lot of mixes and genre playlists and best of playlists and statistical playlists that I like to use, but not one of them shows up on my iPhone, because I'm only syncing my "iPhone" playlist, which I have whittled down to about 14 gigs (out of 55 gigs of music). So there's no way for me to get a subset of music on the phone, but keep all my playlists (obviously then those playlists would only show the subset of songs that happened to be on my iPhone).

Basically what I'm saying is (and this applies to all iPods, I guess), there needs to be a more robust, sensible way to control which songs go on your iPhone, which playlists (as distinct from the songs they contain), which podcasts, etc...
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#28 User is offline   caleb45 Icon

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Posted 16 June 2009 - 04:56 PM

NO!

Let me please delete a song/podcast. Why on earth that most basic of features isn't available on an on an iPod is beyond me.

Also:
Let me add an artist, an album, or a genre to a shuffle able play list. ( so I can add a couple of albums to a play list).


Allow me to get details on a track without playing it.

Make it easier to read long track/album names, this is a major problem when trying to find the right track without actually playing it.

Fix playlist creation. As other's have noted, it's horrible.

Look at the Creative Zen Xtra from years ago. I don't like the Creative company any longer, but that menu system surpassed the iPod in what it allowed me to do.

And again, WHY CAN'T I DELETE A TRACK OF MY IPOD???
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