I bought into the big fruit company!

I can’t really believe it yet - I’ve actually bought into that big fruit company!
No not Del Monte… the other one - Apple!

Yeah, so yesterday I finally gave in to the urge to buy another iPod. It was a pretty quick decision but I have to say it seems like a good one. I’ve been trying to coap with a simpleton mp3 player, a Sony NW-E005 which carries a very basic 2gb of flash based memory so doesn’t really fit a whole lot on it. Further more it insists on you using SonicStage to put music on and from my experience its a pretty buggy app.
So anyways, that thing’s been annoying me as its so awkward to get music on so i’ve been listening to the same stuff for ages. Couldn’t handle it anymore, so i stopped off at Currys on the way home… well not really on the way home, got the bus into town instead of walking the usual way… and i picked up a nice new 80gb Silver iPod Classic. I’ve always had a pretty mixed opinion about apple stuff, don’t get me wrong I don’t dislike them, after all I’ve just bought my second iPod, its just I have a few little annoyances. But i don’t want to rant about apple prices or reliability…
Anyway its pretty much all so far, so good. Had a problem with importing quite a few files though. I recently ’sorted out’ my entire music collection using PicardQT which sets all ID3 tags (new version and old), re-arranges folder structure into Artist > Album and also will attach album art via a plugin which scans Amazon for the covers. Getting this all finished was a fantastic moment - everything looked perfect!
So I came to try and import all my music into my iTunes library last night and I thought I’d start with my Rap/Hip-Hop which has 2 Pac as the first artist… So I went for the drag and drop option between Win explorer and iTunes and only 1 track popped up in the library - wtf? Thats a pretty major fail if you ask me. My first attempt to import music and it doesn’t even try - about 8 albums with only 1 song being imported!?! Anyway, I got most things imported and all album covers attached so Cover Flow looks sexeh on my PC.
I looked up on the interwebs today as to what might cause the problem with failed imports and a few places said maybe the files aren’t mp3s or the ID3 tags are corrupt/invalid. Now wtf!?! i spent hours tagging all my music using PickardQT - that doesn’t write invalid ID3 tags, and it writes in the latest version and the older version just to be on the safe side. And they’re mp3 files according to my Windows Media Player library which has no problems with anything.
Why the hell does every ‘new’ thing I do in computing never work first time?!

Oh, and when I used my iPod this morning on the way to work for the first time, i pulled up Cover Flow only to find it wasn’t arranged perfectly like on my PC, there were still some rogue tracks from some of my dance CDs that weren’t included with the correct albums and therefore missing cover art! Now I don’t know why… its all arranged fine in iTunes, I’ve sync’d my iPod then ejected it, but its not actually sync’d if it doesn’t look the same is it!?!?

Ah well - hopefully I’ll figure something out this weekend. I found a link to an app that says it will ‘fix’ your iTunes library last night. Looks like it will scan a dir, compare it to the library xml file and then add anything thats not been added already and probably a few other things that I missed…
If anybody passing knows anything that might help with the sync and failed import problems I’d greatly appreciate if you would leave a comment or send me an email - mark [at] marksweb [dot] co [dot] uk