iPods suck. They are an abomination. People should stop buying them. Now, before all you anti-Apple zealots start salivating at the chance to bash your most feared and hated enemy, let me explain.

Today, Gughunter says that he doesn't get it. This inspired me to write a comment, which inspired me to write a blog instead. First I will address his implicit question. Then I will address my blasphemy against the Holy Church of the Apple.

Why is the iPod such a phenomenon? My guess is that for the majority of sheep buyers, the list goes something like this, roughly in order:

1. It's cool
2. Everyone else has one
3. It's trendy
4. Those commercials are neat
5. It's cute!
6. Listening to music is trendy
7. Lighter than a couple of CDs
8. Gigabytes, man, GIGABYTES!
9. Shuffle play
10. It's cool
11. Can fit all your 50,000 pirated songs
12. Ooh, it shows album art, pretty!

Not me. I love music. I believe that for the majority of people, music is just an accessory to life. It's something to have on in the background and make you look cool. Not for me. Music is the window to the most spiritual parts of my soul. I love to listen to music. Really listen, focusing on nothing else, getting lost in it. Have you ever done that? Music is a very important part of my life - more important than games, computers, sports, or any other hobby.

Here are the reasons why musical people (like me) love their iPods, in no particular order:

• All of my ~5,000 songs at my fingertips
• If I have the urge to hear anything in my collection wherever I am, I can quickly bring it up
• Physically small size
• Excellent controls
• Organizes my music into playlists, both manually and based on logical criteria
• Easy menu hierarchy to find songs quickly by genre, artist, album, title, playlist
• Good audio quality (not cheap crap, not over the top)
• Several shuffle options, including album, song, and playlist shuffling
• Seamless integration with my computer, including automatic sync of songs and metadata
• Updates metadata such as play count, last played time, etc for any song that's played

So, to address Gughunter's question, I say run out and buy an iPod if you're a music lover like me. Nothing beats it in the combined features of form factor, capacity, ease of use, organization, and seamless integration. If you're just a casual music listener like most people (nothing wrong with that at all), I thank you for considering buying one to drive down the price for people like me. But really, you don't need it. Before running to the store in either case, you might want to read on...

For those who've been following along, you know that my iPod was stolen several weeks ago. I feel lost without it. My commute to and from work absolutely sucks. I either have to dig a few CDs out of storage or listen to the radio, with my choice of (a) news radio with tons of commercials or (b) really really crappy music station with idiotic DJ and terrible ("popular") music. Usually I end up with option (a). I hate it. Hate, hate, hate!

But I have vowed to abstain from buying another iPod until Steve Jobs stops lying to his customers. The iPod sucks, and I won't tolerate it any longer. I refuse to implicitly approve of its flaws any longer by forking over my hard-earned cash.

For those who aren't mindless Apple drones fanboys like me, you may have missed when the Apple CEO stated in a keynote speech that "everyone at Apple is a music lover" (my paraphrase). So what?

I call BS. If everyone at Apple, or at least those working on the iPod product line were a music lover, it would not be the fabulously frustrating piece of junk that it is to me. Music lovers would never have ignored such a critical flaw as that of the iPod. Why do I say such hurtful things? What about all those reasons above to love it? What's wrong with it?

G     A     P     S

There are gaps in between tracks. Short, jarring pauses in between songs lasting tiny fractions of a second. So, uhh, who cares?

Me.

Most songs end and begin with silence. You can't even hear a 0.1 second gap that's surrounded by silence! True.

Most people play their music on shuffle. In this mode, it can actually help to have an extra little pause between two random, completely unrelated songs. True.

Why all the fuss?

Because I am not most people. Music is very important to me, so I care about the little details in the listening experience. It's supposed to be an experience, not just an adequate occurrence.

I own albums where song #1 runs into song #2 with absolutely no audio break in between. This is not the norm, but it happens frequently enough. The best example of this is a live album. Crowd noise exists between successive songs. Play that live album in order on an ordinary CD player from 20 years ago, and it seamlessly moves to track to track without any break in that crowd noise. Play that same album on an iPod and you get little gaps in between all tracks. Little bits of silence that weren't there.

iPod defenders tell me there are easy ways around this. I say that's rubbish (don't you like my British accent?). The first suggestion they offer is to import an entire CD as one huge track. True, that gets rid of the gaps. But it also removes the ability to play individual tracks and store metadata separately for every song! Not acceptable. They say import it twice - once as a whole CD, once as individual songs. Uhh, no. I'm not wasting twice the disk space. Not to mention that any time I play the seamless album version, my individual songs don't have their metadata updated (last played time, play count). I'm very anal about this. So, no.

Other fools will tell me to use crossfading in iTunes and set the crossfade time to 0. Aside from the fact that this effectively skips a small fraction of a second of audio, the iPod doesn't do crossfading!

Finally, some will argue that lossy audio formats such as MP3 and AAC are encoded with fixed frame sizes, resulting in an inherent gap at the end of the song between the time the audio ends and the last frame ends. That's true. They imply that therefore the gap problem is here to stay. But I say there are numerous, easy solutions for this:

• Store metadata within each track to pinpoint the exact end time of the song. Buffer the audio output data sufficiently so that the next sample after the last one in song #1 is the first sample of song #2.
• Import every full CD as one big file and embed a cue sheet as metadata to allow skipping around among tracks. Also track metadata on a per-song basis. To the average user, they'd never know the difference.
• Analyze each song as it is playing for silence at the end of the last frame. Skip that silence.

I've dabbled in the last proposed solution myself and found it to be relatively effective. I'm sure the other two are also quite doable, and not even a huge change to either iTunes or the iPod firmware. Then why hasn't Apple done it yet?

My only explanation is that they simply don't care. Many Apple fanboys love to tout the "fact" that Apple pays attention to detail. Again, I call BS. This is a glaringly obvious detail that hasn't gotten any attention in the nearly 4 years that the iPod has been on the market, nor in the time that iTunes has existed (iTunes, despite having the resources of much more powerful hardware to run on, suffers from the same inexcusable problem). I've complained loudly, directly to Apple, and it has fallen on deaf ears. I've talked to numerous other people on the internet who've agreed with me. Apple does not care.

Why? Because 99.99% of their customers use shuffle play exclusively. Because those customers aren't music lovers. Those people just want to play their top 50 or 100 "favorite" songs, the ones that are popular on MTV, in random order. Gaps between tracks are irrelevant in this mode of operation. Why should Apple devote so much as 2 engineers to this problem for a few months when that money could be better spent on marketing new ways to remove money from the pocket books of a mindless public?

Of course I'm in the vast minority here, but Apple used to be the company that catered to that minority. They've put so many cool things into their hardware and software products as a reward for people like me who are really passionate about something. It's one of the main reasons for their strong cult following. But that was back when they were a computer company and devoted their efforts to making the best damn computers money could buy. No more.

<-- deleted long tangential rant about how the Music Apple is slowly taking over and crappifying the Computer Apple -->

Bottom line, a 20-year-old CD player, ancient in terms of consumer electronics, can do both of the following:

• Play live albums with no gaps between songs
• Skip around among tracks within such an album at will

The iPod, an advanced device which is orders of magnitude more powerful, can't even do the same thing. It can do one or the other (full album as one track == no gaps, no skip; one track per song == skip + gaps), but not both. When the problem is framed in this way, it seems just a bit ridiculous, doesn't it?

So I remain on the lookout for a solution which will accommodate all of my desires listed far above, with the added bonus of gapless album playback. I'm loyal to no company - the first who provides such a product suite at a fair price will enjoy my business. So far I've found none that exists. I've examined the competition. Some iPod competitors claim to offer gapless playback; most offer many extra features that I really don't care about (AM/FM reception, voice recording, video playback, etc). But all such competitors fall woefully short in one or more of the other features for which I continue to love the iPod -- interface and seamless integration being prime among them. Physical size often secondary.

If people stopped buying iPods, maybe then Apple would start listening to me. Maybe then they would make the perfect music listening device. Can I just dream? No, I wouldn't count on it. I'm the minority here. And as in a true democracy, the mob rules all. The iPod remains a fabulous device with a tiny little flaw that I'm fed up with and most people will never notice.

The search goes on...