For those of you interested in buying a 4th-generation iPod, beware.

I bought this iPod thinking it would be the greatest thing ever... play video, pictures, and best of all, ALL of my music! It does all of these functions fairly well, and the battery life is very good (for music; for videos, you might as well bring the power cord... that you must BUY separately~~).

Sound on the iPod is very good, with many different EQ settings enhancing the sound. I don't use the included classic earbuds because they never stay in my ears, but any headphones I plug up work well. I like how the iPod automatically pauses when you unplug the headphones, and it turns on (if hold is off) when you plug them in. The bass could be a little more pronounced, perhaps by a three-level megabass such as those on many Sony CD players. Overall, though, it sounds great.

Photo and video capability on the iPod is also great. The screen, I must say, is fantastic for such a small size. Videos play smoothly, although I have encountered slight hanging and sometimes, on full length movies the video loses lipsync. Also, as I said, you can't watch many videos and/or pictures without the iPod drying up (think: battery life). Don't expect to be able to easily get videos on the iPod either... this can turn into a traumatic experience.

Playback on the iPod is fairly reliable. I have had the player lock up on me a few times, but it is a HD-based player, so this can almost be expected. Shuffle is extremely handy, although I wish the firmware would allow you to select what artists and/or genres were shuffled; sometimes I am not in the mood to hear rap, yet shuffle does not discriminate.

An improvement that is direly needed on the iPod (aside from iTunes... we'll get to that in a moment) is the way you find music. Especially on a 60gb model, where thousands of songs composed by thousands of artists are likely, it is very difficult to find the needed song in any moderate time frame (especially when looking for a specific song under "Songs" view). If you play the click wheel just right, it will zoom incredibly fast through the ABC-ordered songs, but it is VERY hard to get it to stop on the desired letter, much less song. Apple needs to update its firmware so that users can go directly to a letter in the alphabet, eliminating the need to scroll through ALL of the songs.

Some other things the iPod lacks are FM tuner/recorder and voice recorder. These are possible through some accessories, but I believe these should be givens for such a "great player."

Now for my iPod soapbox. My first erk is the lack of included power adapter. That is just sad. Apple is truly ripping-off America. Another turn-off is the video-out capability. It’s a great idea in theory, but not easily accomplished. You must BUY yet another accessory from Apple, a SEEMINGLY standard RCA cable. Regular RCA cables won't work.

This brings me to the reasons for which I am selling the iPod. The lack of accessories I may have dealt with grudgingly. However, the hassle you must endure to put songs ON the iPod and actually FIND them is ridiculous. My first problem with iTunes was the library itself. My music is on a separate hard drive, so after importing all the songs into iTunes (about an hour process, on a FAST computer), the next time I unplugged the hard drive iTunes thought none of my music existed. Anger. It then proceeded to do the "handy" auto-update of my iPod, thereby erasing over 2,000 songs from my iPod to match the "empty" library. I was mad.

After I finally corrected this problem, I made an attempt to delete all duplicate songs; iTunes has a handy feature to locate them. The only problem is that any remotely similar songs show up, and if you delete them (which I thought to be a good idea), you lose both the original copy and the duplicate song. There goes another few thousand songs from the iPod. AutoUpdate was promptly turned off.... Also, if you’re anything like me, your music may be organized via folders, and not all of your ID3 tags are correct. To find them on the iPod, look forward to searching through thousands of songs. Quite a pain.

FINALLY, when songs go onto the iPod, the songs’ filenames are renamed to a random four-letter/number combination. iTunes then randomly places the renamed files into one of 50 random folders. This is VERY painful if you want to give a friend a few songs from the iPod, or want to put them on another computer. iTunes won't allow songs to transfer from the iPod to a computer’s library. Big surprise.

So, even with the moderate plusses the player has to offer, I don't think it's worth the trouble of fighting Apple every time you want to upload or download a song or video. The stunningly barren feature list is another con. Finally, the extremely irritating software (iTunes), lack of "drag-and-drop" capability, and no included accessories simply do not fit the high price tag mighty Apple places upon the iPod. If you’re not obsessive about being in control over your music, and how to actually FIND it, you may enjoy the very simplistic, limited-access iPod. However, for anyone else, I do not recommend.