Over Christmas I received a new 30GB iPod Video from my parents. Already I've decided it's just about the coolest thing ever made. Of course, I have some issues with it, and some confusion on its working habits, but overall I love the thing. So now I'm one of those guys who goes around all over the place with those little white headphones on.
Some reasons I love it:
1. Its size. The thing is so small and shaped just right so that it fits neatly into just about any pocket on my person. Despite its size the screen is ample and the control wheel is just the right proportion. Plus I can bring it with me into my car (or back out) so I don’t interrupt my listening pleasure for more than a few seconds when traveling around.
2. Its easy I/O. Plug your headphones or output source into the little hole on the top. Plug the USB cable into the hole on the bottom. And that’s all there is to it.
3. Its “HOLD” switch. This is pure brilliance. If you don’t have an iPod, one thing that is noticeable is that the control wheel thing is very pressure sensitive – this means a jostle in your pocket could suddenly jolt the volume up to eardrum-tearing loud, or even skip ahead a song or something. The HOLD switch, the only other feature on the top of the unit besides the phones jack, effectively switches off the control wheel. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I’d had that feature on an old-school Walkman. (Was my grammar on that horrible?)
4. Its… Appleness. Appletude. Applocity. One thing I’ve always found frustrating about Mac computers is Apple’s insistence on making the interface simple to the point of starkness. One button mouse. One application focus on the screen. It’s like they’re afraid of giving their users anything but a big plastic white box with a single “DO COMPUTER STUFF” button on the front of it (also in white). I get easily frustrated by the lack of options when everything is so… unavailable compared to the potential.
But on a handheld device, the Apple approach works beautifully. There’s never going to be a time when I need the wheel to scroll through a menu and raise the volume, so it’s great to have one control for both. There’s no need for a full Stop button on a digital player, so the single Play/Pause button is all one needs. The GUI does everything it needs to and nothing else: Cycle through a couple of menus to choose your media a few different ways, and that’s about it. No need for flashing whatchadoos or anything fancy: Text and a few meaningful icons handle everything. The screen is small physically, so trying to do anything fancy would be a waste of space.
Of course, I do have some things to get used to. Maybe some of my Pod-Savvy friends can help me out here…
Synching with iTunes? As it stands now, I haven’t downloaded anything but a couple of podcasts. The rest of my music is MP3s of my CDs that I’ve backed up on the hard drive (then I play them through iTunes). My question is, will it be ok to delete the MP3 files from my hard drive once I’ve ported them to the iPod? I’m afraid either A) they’ll wind up copied back into iTunes once I hook the iPod up again or B) the iPod will just sync to what’s in iTunes, and drop those tunes.
I ask this because I’m doing all this on my work computer. My machine at home is pathetically old and slow, with laughably-sized hard drives that could never support a music collection – but my machine at work should be relatively clear of space-wasting music, too, so that I can use it for… you know, work stuff.
Volume consistency? I know I have iTunes set up to compare the volumes of all the music files. But, listening on the go, the volume from song to song seems to jump around – especially on shuffle, since I have a fairly even distribution of contemporary pop, classic rock, classical, and jazz, all of which usually have drastically different levels from one another (classical is typically much lower, for example). Is there any way around this, or is it simply a hard fact of recorded music?
Playlist shuffling? Say I only want to listen to hard rock songs for the day. I can create a playlist in iTunes with all songs that qualify. When I listen on my iPod later, will I be able to shuffle on just that playlist? Or am I stuck shuffling through the entire library and playing a list from end to end?
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