My Hipster In-law's Crappy iPod Shuffle

My Hipster In-law's Crappy iPod Shuffle: About a week ago, my wife’s mother got herself a brand new 2nd generation mint-green iPod shuffle. I find it really amusing that increasing number of people from the older age group are fast adapting to the latest gadget trend. But this article is not about my cool mother-in-law, it’s about the crappy iPod Shuffle and its software support.

As the only certified nerd in the family, I was asked to load some songs for the new iPod Shuffle. And without any hesitation, I happily agreed to help. I decided to do the syncing before I went to bed as I thought it will only take a matter of time to finish. But I was wrong. At about 11:30 PM, when I connected the Shuffle to the USB port it was not detected by my computer hence it can’t be recognized by iTunes. I visited Apple’s website for support then I followed several troubleshooting instructions. The computer finally discovered the shuffle and I lived happily ever after. Not! The computer did detect the Shuffle but not in iTunes. So once again I patiently searched for help and with a little luck on my side, iTunes finally saw the Shuffle after several tries. I can at last relax and just watch cartoons while waiting for the iPod to finish syncing or loading the songs. Not! The syncing stopped with the following error message “Disk cannot be read from or written to”. So I tried restoring the iPod but now it gives another error message that says “The iPod could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (1418)”. Now I’m beginning to worry as the Shuffle will be needed in the morning for my mom’s travel.

It was already 1am and I’m now using a special tool called Google to look for help. I bumped into several articles telling horror stories about the Shuffle. There was also that website called 1418hell.com. I tried some of their suggestions to help solve the 1418 error but it was no good. I finally just took matters into my own hands and restored the iPod by formatting it first in FAT, not FAT32 and then restored it by way of iTunes. But, I still can’t sync the iPod and it’s now already 2am. I even tried MediaMonkey and a program called iShuffle for syncing but to no avail. Now I want to eat that little shuffle as I was hungry and sleepy at the same time. I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes a million times because that’s what Apple says until I gave up at around 4am.

I slept tight for just an hour but it was good enough to clear my mind. I realized that the problem could be caused by iTunes; it could have messed up the Windows Registry. So I decided to use a computer with no previous iTunes installation which we luckily have in the office. Problem solved at 6:30 am.

I’m writing this article because I have been wanting to say to Apple to go to Hell. But I don’t want to say those bad words to them because I’m a good boy. I’m just hoping that Apple will fix these issues immediately because iPod, in this case the Shuffle is a great product and bugs like these are inexcusable. I pity those who have just bought their shiny new iPod Shuffle and are very eager to listen to it already but then have to experience the same problem that I had with it. There's nothing I can do but to wish them luck.