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Originally Posted by MovieBird
You mean MP3 players did not exist before the iPod? What about all the Creative products? The Nomad II even had a wheel similar to what the iPod ended up with. I can't find a ship date for it, but there's an Epionions review for it several months before the iPod debuted. Also, the manual is copyright 1999. But if you mean the actual capacitive touch of the wheel, well, Apple didn't invent that. Synaptics did. |
I had a Nomad II. It was *horrible.* Just horrible. It is what drove me to buy an iPod, which was my first Apple product.
What made the iPod successful wasn't it's design (which was fine), or even the itunes store. It was the way that iTunes integrated with the iPod. Itunes is bloaty and overstuffed now, but at the time, it was *vastly* superior to any other music management program for 80% of consumers.
Most people at that time were still interested in a way to move their CDs to MP3 players, and iTunes was extremely easy to use - you just stuck the CD in the drive and hit "rip" - Gracenote looked up the data for you and while you could tag, you weren't required to.
It also had very powerful playlists and smart playlists, and flawless syncing.
It was a *real* program in an era where the programs that came with other players were either at the level of the free programs you get when you buy a camera, or else much much worse. (Sony's program was particularly bad). Music management programs that were supposed to sync often didn't, and were very buggy when syncing, either crashing or hanging.
Other music management programs tended not to come with ripping software...and if they did, there was no gracenote function.
Some didn't come with programs at all and just had you move files and folders. This worked fine when your player only held a few dozen songs, but it is very inconvenient when you have 1000+
If I had a CD I wanted to put on my Nomad, I had to first rip the cd (I don't remember what ripper I used to use); it gave me generically named files. I then had to change the names of the folder to match the artist (if I didn't already have an artist folder), album name and the files to match the song name. I then had to move these folder to wherever I wanted it on my computer. Then I plugged in my nomad and dragged the folders or files I wanted to the device.
With iTunes, I put the CD in the drive and hit rip. (ITunes did all of the labeling, indexing, and moving). When the ripping was done, I plugged in my iPod and the songs were automatically transferred to my iPod.
*This* is why the iPod eventually became 80% of the market. While I think the iPod had a nice design and was certainly more usable than my Nomad (which required you to go through a couple of menus before you could even play music), it was the simplicity of putting music on the iPod and keeping track of it that made it so much better than any other player out there at the time.
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As far as iTunes, it's very nicely integrated. However, you could purchase digital music before iTunes, just not all in one place. If you wanted a single source for music, Napster or Kazaa were always available.
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I don't think that the music store itself helped until the iPod was already established in the market; I think I bought maybe 10 songs the first year I had an iPod. I was still buying mostly CDs because I was worried about the permanence of digital music (itunes still had DRM at that time).