After years of iPods, generations and more generations (are we in the fifth or in the sixth?), about four kinds of iPod (touch, classic, nano, shuffle), iPods with phones, iPods with cameras, and Apple is not able to deliver a basic and simple functionality: delete a song.
Normally I do not hear music in my laptop. Thus, my iTunes is not highly customized. I have the tracks names, the album cover and nothing more. Just a few songs have ratings, and I do not have playlists. This because I do not use my time in front of the laptop to organize my musics.
Therefore, when I rip some of my CDs to iPod, I add all musics without exception. In some cases I remember the musics that I enjoy, but some other times I do not. And when hearing on my iPod I need to skip musics that I do not enjoy. And as iPod does not includes paper and a pencil, I do not have time to write down the music that I do not like to remove it later.
Some people use another trick: they rate musics to delete with one star. Then, when syncing with iTunes, they go through those musics and remove them.
While this last solution is not properly bad, I can not understand why iPods does not include a delete command. I can not understand what are the syncing problems that might arise. It is just a matter of defining one solution, and use it. Some options:
- when you delete a music in the iPod it removes the music from the flash disk, and adds the music in a black list (for instance, the MD5 of the file). When syncing no file is removed from iTunes, but no musics are uploaded to iPod that are in the black list;
- when you delete a music in the iPod, the music is removed both from the iPod and from the hosting iTunes when it syncs. Of course this can be accompanied of a message for confirmation;