AAUG Reviews

By Wayne Watson, AAUG Member
Reviewed 7/06

Have you ever glanced at a book on the store book shelf and the book just cried out to go home with you? Well, this book jumped into my basket from the AAUG reviews table and ran away to my house.

A little background is in order. Our family has five iPods, of varying sizes and versions. The newest is a 4 GB Nano I purchased for my wife 8 months ago. 18 months ago, my wife surprised me with a 40 GB photo iPod, and our teenagers have two 6 GB iPod minis and one 20 GB iPod. We use an iMac (OS 10.4) and run iTunes 6. However, with so many people updating their iPods and monkeying around with iTunes and the iPod sync protocols, each of these iPods have developed varying idiosyncrasies and periodic glitches that frustrate us. I have felt at a loss for information that can help me reset, restore, or otherwise fix my problems. Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love our iPods and wouldn’t consider any other MP3 players. But periodic maintenance seems reasonable considering how may hours we use our iPods. For instance, some of our songs in iTunes have exclamation points next to them. This manual helped me solve this problem.

Within a few minutes of browsing through his manual, I had a new respect for the full potential of each of our iPods. For instance, we now know how to efficiently use our iPods, in addition to storing music, as an external hard disk to store other data or for transferring to another computer. Our school children use their iPods to transfer home work assignments to and from school. If I did not have this manual, I would have spent some time surfing the Apple website for similar information. Instead, we can quickly flip through this book and come up with ways to maximize our use of the iPods. I enjoyed having a book to lay out flat during a lunch instead of surfing the net for such information. My time is valuable. I prefer to read an informative and well-organized book like this than spend hours surfing the net for similar information. I even took the book on a recent camping trip to read around the campfire. This sounds strange but it was fun having a book explain how our iPods can do so much more than we realize.

I used the manual to quickly connect our iPods to our home stereo for less than $15.00. We also used the manual to clean up our iTunes music files and perform other routine preventive maintenance. The boys and I have been flipping through different chapters of the book and share new trivia tidbits with one another.

I am the kind of person who reads an owners manual for a new car, camera, or even a bicycle. I have been looking for a book that explained all the back road details and short cuts of our iPods and iTunes 6. This is the best Apple book I have purchased since the original red-covered Macintosh Bible I purchased for my Macintosh 128 back in 1986. The price was not a consideration, considering my family has five iPods to maintain in good working order. I enjoyed this Missing Manual so much I cannot wait to read their manual for iPhoto 6.