Like the title says, every now and again, I have to rant about how annoying iPods (and by extension, Apple) are. This is one of those times.

The picture below represents the folder hierarchy of my 20GB iPod, as displayed in the Ubuntu Disk Analyzer:

Right now, this iPod is nearly full. I filled it with a very normal hodge-podge of songs. Naturally, I like some artists better than others, and so, I have more of their songs. The Beatles and Zeppelin, for example, I have a lot of. A-Ha, and Four Non Blondes, not so much. When this is the case, I'll have a folder filled with lots of songs - a big folder. If you look at the image above though, you'll see that my iPod is organized into 50 equal directories, named r1 to r50.

Now, why would Apple do this? Why would they take perfectly organized songs in neat and tidy folders and then split them into 50 folders with meaningless names? Because that makes it more of a pain in the butt to figure out what music is on the iPod, and in theory makes it harder to share the songs. For the copyright violators, this should slow them down.

For the rest of the world, it's a pain, because rather than browsing our iPod like we would a normal music player, instead we must use iTunes, or, if we use Linux, reverse engineer the thing, which invariably doesn't work that well.

Apple could have made a device that worked normally on all computers, like everybody else did, but instead they have locked us into iTunes, a weird directory structure, and a system designed to be as obscure as possible. Not cool.

I know this post is going to alienate just about everybody that would ever consider reading my blog, but here's the deal: I want all iPods to support the ogg file format.

For the uninitiated, the ogg format is like the MP3 or the AAC format, except for a couple of very important differences. One, it's free, which is to say that it doesn't belong to some company, and every time I use it I'm not supposed to be giving them a nickel or something. (The MP3 format technically is licensed to the company that created it, so theoretically, every time you buy a computer, MP3 player, etc., you're supposed to give them some quantity of money.)

The other reason that I am hereby requesting ogg on my iPod is because it's better. It sounds better. It compresses better. Are there other metrics that we should be using? None that I know of. I want ogg. Steve Jobs, do you hear me now?!

Now, the theoretical argument above holds water, but I have personal reasons for this desire: I have 357 ogg files that I can't listen to on my iPod! This pretty much gives me three choices: One, install Rockbox on my iPod (I have, it didn't work reliably). Two, convert the ogg files to MP3s (this solution would create inferior-quality songs). Or, three, only listen to those songs on my computer (also a lame solution).

I should also mention while I am on this rant that I have flac files as well. Why doesn't the iPod support those! iPods are great, but these are serious shortcomings.