Apple is like a manipulative lover. They lure you in with the promise of love, and usability, and shininess. And for the first few weeks that's what you get.

Hey! It's shiny. Hey! The menus animate nicely. Hey! it downloads podcasts and syncs them.

But then then the honeymoon is over, and your lover reveals their true colours. You want to import a TV show or podcast, well fuck you. iTunes isn't letting you. And now you're stuck with iTunes, and iTunes loves you. iTunes is going to smash your ankles with a sledgehammer to stop you leaving.

Remember that shiny back? Now it's got a massive scratch down it. Those nice menus? They're plain white and you can't customise them. You can't even use 3rd party tools because your iPod is locked down.

I've finally snapped. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more. iTunes refusal to import external media is ridiculous and infuriating. All I want to do is import some old podcast mp3s from a defunct podcast, and put it under the podcast menu on my iPod. It should be simple. I should be able to right click Podcasts, create a new one, and drag and drop some mp3s.

But I can't. Maybe there is some long way to do it within iTunes...? There is not.

You have to trick iTunes into downloading them from a RSS feed, by using a WAMP server. You copy the mp3s to your server, and write a XML file, then let iTunes download them. What a fucking joke. I can't believe the hassle it takes to do something so simple. And it's not even recent problem, I realised I'd have to do this after reading a blog post from June 2007. That means other people have had the same problem for at least 2 years, and it's been problematic enough to deserve a blog post about it. Worst of all, I haven't even done it yet, because I can't be bothered to write the XML for all 70 episodes.

I've encountered this before. You can't talk about importing TV shows from DVDs on their forums. You also can't move videos en masse from films to TV shows in iTunes. Ripping DVDs it not by itself illegal, assuming you don't bypass security measures which violates the DMCA, which incidentally only affects you yankee doodles out there. And some TV shows and films are released under non-restrictive licences, meaning you're legally allowed to do what the hell you want with them. Including putting them onto your iPod. But try telling that to Apple.

Fuck Apple. I'm never buying another one of their products again.

Bonus points to anyone who picks out the two deliberate book and film references. They're both pretty obvious.