Yesterday afternoon we drove back from San Diego to San Francisco. Overall, the trip was pretty smooth - except for one major annoyance. I had brought my laptop along, and the day before the trip back I had downloaded some podcasts for myself as well as my kids. However, when I synced those to my iPod using iTunes, something went wrong, resulting in a corrupted iPod. The iPod still showed that it was half full, but none of the music showed up. iTunes completely hung when it tried to connect to the iPod, and Windows Explorer wasn’t happy either. I suppose the database on the iPod must have gotten corrupted somehow. I have not yet tried resetting the iPod and uploading my music again, but I hope that that’s all there is to it.
The bottom line is that we were stuck listening to the radio, as we hadn’t brought any CDs along. I had forgotten how much radio sucks… It seems like the radio stations on the route between San Diego and San Francisco only play Mexican folk music, christian rock, country, oldies, and hip-hop - none of which I care for. In the end I settled for a couple of classic rock stations, which seemed like the least bad of the bunch. It got so far that I was actually happy to hear Guns N’Roses…
In my case this was just an annoyance, but it definitely raises some concerns about using the iPod for more serious data storage. For example, there are adapters that allow the iPod to synchronize with digital cameras. While this sounds like a very convenient solution for long trips on which you don’t want to carry your laptop with you, I would be very careful about storing a whole trip’s worth of pictures on the iPod without having another backup. I suppose as long as you have access to a networked computer, you could always transfer the pictures from the iPod to another source, such as an FTP server.