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Installation
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The
install went rather smoothly, with the exception that the Nano itself did
lock up when I connected it for the first time...not a good sign.
However, after resetting the device, we were back in business.
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The
screenshot to your left is where the Nano did lockup. At this point, I
had to disconnect the player and perform a soft reset. For those, like
myself, who are not a fan of Quicktime, you do have the option of not
setting the installed applications as your default audio player. In a
Windows XP system, the Nano is identified as a USB mass storage device.
However, it does not install as separate drive on your system, forcing you
to use their iTunes software to communicate with the device. We will,
however, show you an excellent third-party application later in this review
for those who do not wish to use iTunes.
Bundled
Software
The
included CD will install all required software, including the proper
drivers, iTunes software, and the Quicktime software. I can confirm
that the Nano does ship with a later build of iTunes Version 4. You
will be prompted with an option to update to Version 5 upon the first
launch. Most my be already familiar with iTunes, so we'll take a brief
look at the software...
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The
first side menu is your library, which will list all your music files.
The second menu is the infamous PodCasts, which have sparked quite a bit of
news around the web, both good and bad. Basically, Podcasts can be
described as a set of subscriptions or feeds that are updated regularly
similar to blogging tools used here and in a variety of other websites. With iTunes, these are generally free radio shows which you can subscribe to
and listen at any time with your iPod.
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Party Shuffle basically acts as a standard shuffle function found on other
players. It will automatically choose songs from your library or
playlists. You can add or remove songs at anytime as well.
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You
can also listen to internet radio and browse through a variety of genres.
The music store allows you to conveniently purchase or download mp3 files
for your Ipod. From here, you can also subscribe to podcasts...
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You
can conveniently browse through the wide variety of podcasts available.
Podcasting has taken the internet by storm lately, and with good reason.
These are great, and you can subscribe to just about anything you can think
of. Perhaps we will cover this in a separate article since there is so
much to say about it. However, if you do not find what you're looking
for within iTunes, do a google search on podcasts and you'll be surprised by
what you find. A majority are indeed free.
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iTunes nor the Nano support wma files out of the box. However, the
software will properly convert these files to a supported format.
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