Unlucky with iPods

A couple of years ago, I had a great iPod. Then it was stolen. My husband bought a new iPod and one day, it just stopped working. We took it into the Apple Store to be replaced but they would not replace it. There was a dent on the back of the case when we bought it, which we reported to the store. It turns out this dent was what caused the failure but no one had noted the dent in their customer service system so the skin we had on it was blamed for the dent. This past Christmas, my husband bought me a Shuffle. Recently, it has been flashing the green-and-orange light while not working. It turns out that this is a fairly common problem with Shuffle users. For now, turning it on and off a couple of times seems to fix it. I'm sure that it will stop working completely within the next week. Most likely I am going to have to go back to the Apple Store to try to get them to replace my less-than-one-year-old Shuffle. I find it a little ridiculous that it's suddenly having problems. My Shuffle hasn't been dropped a lot - maybe once or twice. When I am at work, it sits on my computer tower playing music. It travels in the cell phone pouch in my purse then it gets popped onto the charger as soon as I sit down at my desk at home. I really hope that the Apple Store will replace my Shuffle. Otherwise I will never buy another Apple product.

PC-girl going Mac?

I've always been a PC girl. My Windows machine has always done pretty much what I wanted it to. Now I've run into somewhat of a snag. I do quite a bit of amateur voice acting and lately it's been a lot of singing parts. However, I can't get my Windows-based laptop to mix music properly. So I will be looking into getting a MacBook. I'm currently using Audacity for my voice recording needs. And it does a good job at recording. However, when you go to mix tracks, you can't manipulate one track while you have the other tracks open. Meaning: if you want to mix two vocal tracks with one instrumental track and one of the vocal tracks needs the volume raised. Audacity won't allow you to change the volume on JUST that track. You need to close the other two tracks, try to get the volume on the first track correct then reopen the other tracks to mix. It's time consuming and annoying. I end up with tracks that has the instrumental part too loud most of the time.

After talking to some friends that own Macs, I really like what GarageBand has to offer. I can have a bunch of tracks open and manipulate each track however I want. Of course, the main problem is the price. We purchased our Dell laptop just about a year ago so we're still paying that off, which makes a Mac a bit unaffordable at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to scratch together enough money to buy one soon. It would be nice to be able to work on the music stuff properly.

Granted, I'm not looking to change everything over to Mac. I still enjoy video games, which my PC does very well. But I'm not elitist. I know that certain machines do certain things better than other machines do. I'm OK with that. I just need to find which machine does what I want and does it well. And maybe I can branch out with some other media-based projects with it at the same time.