I'm pretty sure this belongs here.

I have a 160 gig iPod Classic that I use exclusively for travel. The iPod and my Bose QC15s can get me through the longest flight without breaking a sweat.

Recently, I upgraded to iTunes 11. I'll ignore for the moment the fact that it manged to make my DVD drives invisible -- after a little Googling, I find a fix for that. It involved a registry edit, which doesn't faze me at all, but could put off some people who don't like to tinker with the registry.

In addition to my entire CD collection, I also put CDs of music that I write on my iPod -- I may have mentioned that I write musicals in other threads. My current project is what is called "wall-to-wall," meaning that it's almost continuous music from curtain up to curtain down (some musicals are written this way). Previous versions of iTunes could recognize a "gapless" CD, i.e. one that doesn't have a 2-second pause between each track. Version 11, however, does not. Apparently, it consults its own catalog for this information and, if the CD is not there, it inserts pauses between tracks. Of course, my CDs, consisting of MY music, are not iTunes, so I get the gaps.

This is infuriating. I uninstalled iTunes 11 and, after some searching, found a copy of version 10 and installed that. Of course, that necessitated wiping out my music library as well as everything on the iPod. It took several hours to add my ripped CDs to the iTunes music library, and then another several hours to put them back on the iPod. I've just re-ripped the CD for my musical and I'm hoping that all will be well once it's re-synced to my iPod.

This, by the way, is the reason that I absolutely hate Apple, and why my iPod (for which there is no non-Apple alternative) is the only Apple product I will every own. Apple simply assumes that everyone either buys commercial CDs or buys tracks and albums from the Apple store. It never occurs to Apple that there may be perfectly legal home-burned CDs.