Album Mix(ups)

My neighbor across the street, "Cross Eyed Julie" Nowak, asked about borrowing my blog. It seems her phone's music player goes haywire. But what do you expect? She has an iPhone 3G.

She insists about writing about it on my blog, so below follows her account of this, which may change after she downloads iPhony OS 3.1 -- or maybe not. I wouldn't count on it, but here is her guest post.

Hello, I'm Julie Nowak, known as Cross Eyed Julie by my own choice, since my eyes do go that way when I take my glasses off.

Unlike Delia Jean, I love Apple and own two Macs, three iPods and an iPhone 3G. Now, usually I love music and love all my Apple products, but I cannot figure out why my phone's iPod app does the things it does (kind of a Temptations way of saying it?).

For example, it keeps crashing, over and over and over again. I looked online for advice, and I followed what others did: I've turned the iPhone off and back on again, and did the "hard reset," which is holding down the sleep/power button on the top and the home button on the front.

But still the silly thing still crashes. And crashes. And crashes. I even restored the iPhone, erasing everything on it, and reloaded the operating system, but it still crashes. Since everything else works fine on the phone, I decided not to go to my AT&T store or the Genius Bar at the Apple Store.

Since I downloaded the new 3.0 operating system in July, the iPod app has gotten even weirder, as my photos below show. It still crashes regularly, and it can't seem to match up the right album art! It either loses the covers or puts the wrong ones in! I show ample evidence below, if you please...
























The song and artist are Sheryl Crow, yet the iPhone displays the artwork for KISS's 1976 album Rock and Roll Over. But when you turn the phone horizontally...

















The right cover appears! I Googled about this and looked over forums and advice columns, which suggested that I delete the songs from the iPhone and then reload and resync. They claimed this would fix the problem, except...
























It keeps on doing it. iPod app thinks that The Rosebuds, a current indie pop group from Raleigh, N.C., is the old 60s garage rockers The Electric Prunes!

























The app also can't keep its legendary female rockers straight, either! Here it gives me Patti Smith's Wave (1979) as the album, when it's really a Christmas song by The Pretenders off Learning to Crawl (1984).

I find the one below the weirdest. For the album The Silver Strut, by jazz saxophonist Rickey Woodard, iPod chooses artwork for the Stone Temple Pilots' 2001 album Shangri-La Dee Da.

























Turn my little baby sideways, though, and it shows the right art.


















Oh, please, Apple, won't you fix this? I love my iPhone 3G and would like it to play 10 songs without crashing. And show the right album art. And not shuffle songs when I don't want it to. Oh, wait. I can shut that feature, Shake to Shuffle, off. Just go to System Preferences and turn it off. Or else when I step down a curb, the iPhone makes this odd electronic bloo-doonk sound and jumps to another song!

Well, there ya have it. My friend Cross Eyed Julie and her messed-up iPhony. I let her have the floor a bit because she is very shy and doesn't want to have her own blog. We're good friends, as long as we don't get into too much discussion over Apple and their dorko products. Will Apple fix this problem? Do dogs meow? Is Steve Jobs humble?

Well, you can probably guess what I think.