So, I have a hammock, an OTT sleeping bag and some walking sticks. I'm sure the latter have a more fancy name than that but essentially they're walking sticks. Most importantly, however, I have my iPod.

I have spent most of the last few weeks putting enormous amounts of music, podcasts and spoken word onto it and am finally getting to the end of this mammoth task. It is disconcerting to realise that I have enough music etc to last me almost 100 days of solid listening and yet my iPod is only half full. I'm clearly going to have to considerably expand my musical tastes if I am ever to meet the challenge of filling it.

I have also found categorising everything a task in itself. As most of you will know, when you offer iTunes a CD, it looks on the net to see what labels other people have given the album and tracks. With most 'popular' music i.e. rock, pop, indie etc this works fine. With classical music, you are often presented with a bit of a mess. It doesn't help that iTunes isn't really designed for classical music – for a start, you usually want to categorise by composer, not artist, but in iTunes, the artist is the be-all-and-end-all. Secondly, iTunes takes the CD name as the album name which works fine with, say, Elvis Presley's greatest hits, but doesn't work when you have a CD of Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic playing two Mahler symphonies. With the way iTunes has been designed, it assumes that I will later search for this music by looking for 'Simon Rattle/Berlin Phil' and album name 'Mahler Symphonies'. So, I have to go through all the tracks, making sure the composer has been spelled correctly and changing the album names to reflect the actual piece, so instead of having 'Mahler Symphonies', I will change half the tracks to 'Symphony No. 1 in x minor Op. xx' and the other half to 'Symphony No. 2 etc'.

I also have to remove the 'artist' information and smuggle that in with the track names (which often become rather long) because I don't want 'Simon Rattle' to appear in the 'artist' list, along side Elvis, Linkin Park, Kings of Leon etc. This is because, while when I listen to Mahler, I want to know who is playing/conducting, I am extremely unlikely to want to search for 'Simon Rattle', lovely as he is (yes, he's conducted me and he's fab) . This pickiness stems from a desire to retain control over the length and relevance of my list of artists – I take the view that when you have so much music on a iPod, if you don't take care with the 'artist', 'composer' etc lists, they can quickly lose their relevance and browsing through your collection becomes akin to wading through mud.

This leads to my gripe about the 'comment' section which appears on iTunes but which is ignored by the iPod. What's the point of it? I used to bung all the information regarding orchestra, conductor, soloists etc in there only to discover that it wouldn't appear on the iPod. If that were to change, that would go some way to improving the iPod for lovers of classical music.

This isn't really such a big deal and those of you who don't care about classical music and/or don't have iPods, won't care but it is a bugbear of mine that the iTunes designers, for some reason, didn't think through all the possible kinds of music that might be downloaded. When you have to spend your time correcting the label for every track on every CD you own, because there is no standard way of labelling them and therefore no one will have followed the system you have had to invent for yourself, it begins to grate a little.

(This doesn't really detract from my deep seated happiness that iPods exist and that I can therefore take silly amounts of music travelling with me. Roll on reasonably priced iReaders/Kindles and eBooks.)