How my mom turned me into an iPod fan
Written: Mar 30 '04 (Updated Mar 30 '04)
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Pros: Phenomenally huge storage capacity, excellent usability, and chic, trendy design.
Cons: It 'glitched out' on me a couple of times, forcing me to reinstall the system.
The Bottom Line: The newer iPod mini may be 'sexier', but this top-of-the-line classic iPod excels in sheer capacity.
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| dtobias's Full Review: Apple iPod 40 GB White MP3 Player |
"How about an iPod?"
That's what my mom said as she was trying to think of something to give me for Chanukkah that I actually wanted, and didn't already have. This always stumps her every time the holidays or my birthday roll around, and resorting to actually asking me doesn't work much better; I usually have no idea myself. If I think of something I want, I can usually afford to buy it on my own, so I probably already have it by the time the next holiday or birthday comes. So she has to try to get a little more creative, and that's what she thought of this time.
And I was stumped for an answer... I really only had a fairly vague concept at the time of just what an iPod was. I knew Apple Computer made them and that they were really hip and trendy, and there were some cutesy TV commercials for them to which I hadn't really paid much attention. Really, I hadn't given that much thought to anything from Apple since they ticked me off 20 years ago by releasing their first Macintosh, which went against everything I stood for as a lifelong computer geek - unlike the earlier Apple II (which was the first computer I ever owned, in 1980), the original Mac had no expansion slots, no command-line-based operating system... you just used the stuff Apple wanted you to have, with a point-and-drool interface. Not a real computer... thus, I migrated to the PC platform instead, and despite picking up an intense hatred of all things Microsoft over the years, I never gained any liking for Apple stuff either.
OK, anyway, this iPod thingy is a portable gadget that does... what? Plays music, clearly (those cutesy silhouettes in the commercials are rocking out)... and I seemed to remember something about it possibly being able to keep appointments and addresses too, so maybe it's some sort of cross between a Diamond Rio and a PalmPilot? Somehow, that didn't seem enough to make it such a hip and with-it item, and worth its rather stiff price. So I went online to do some more research into just what this thing was.
When I did find more info, I was impressed. The iPod was a big advance over earlier portable digital music players; it had a phenomenally huge capacity, as high as 40 gigabytes of storage space. Of all the computers I've owned, only my newest has more disk space than that... I never expected to see such storage in a portable unit. Here was a device that could hold the equivalent of a sizeable CD collection, in your pocket. And it's built with a very intuitive, easy-to-use interface... even a "geek" like myself could do without cumbersome tech stuff when I just want to listen to a song.
But would it work with my Windows-based PC? Since it came from Apple, I'd expect it to be most congenial with MacOS systems. However, I discovered that iPods are now fully compatible with both Windows and MacOS, and its associated iTunes software, for organizing your music library, uploading it to the iPod, and accessing Apple's music store, comes in both Mac and PC versions. So there was no platform barrier for me.
By now I was convinced; that's what I wanted. So, during a trip to New York City, we went to the big Apple store (in the Big Apple!) to get one. It turned out that lots of other people had the same idea; they were sold out of all models except the highest-capacity, and highest-priced, 40 GB model. Fortunately, my mom was willing to spring for that... thanks, Mom!
OK, now I had an iPod... a top-of-the-line one, at that. Next step was to set it up. That had to wait until I was back home in Florida, where my computer is. On arriving and beginning the setup process, I hit a stumbling block immediately. The iPod came with cables to hook it up to a FireWire port on a computer, but my computer didn't have one. That's not unusual; that type of port is more common on Macs than PCs. So there's still some pro-Mac bias in this Apple product... they bundled it with adapters for two types of FireWire, but nothing for the ports more likely to be found in the "Wintel" platform. My choices were to get a FireWire card for my PC, or an adapter to connect the iPod to the USB port I already have. Either would require a trip to the store, and since it was Christmas Eve at the time, I had to hurry before everything closed. Fortunately, I managed to get the USB adapter, though I had to try more than one store before finding it; even the local Apple store was sold out.
From there on, it was smooth sailing getting the iPod hooked up and set up. This model comes with a docking station you can leave connected to your computer, and simply insert the iPod every time you wish either to update your music library or charge its batteries (it can do both at once, if you connect a power cord to the dock). It also comes with the iTunes software on CD, but you're encouraged to download the newest version from the Internet.
My next step was to build my music library. iTunes helpfully offered to look through my hard drive for sound files to add to the library, supporting popular formats such as MP3. I let it do this, but pangs of conscience (the iPod's packaging included a label saying "DON'T STEAL MUSIC!") led me to delete a few files of dubious origin that I'd had lying around. (I did, however, have a number of music files that were perfectly legal, being purchased from online download stores or downloaded from the artists' own sites. Then there were the tough-moral-dilemma files - some rare track released only in some distant place, and out of print for years even there, which I'd gotten as a technically illegal Internet download off a fan Web site or forum - should I go for 100% squeaky-clean status by trashing it - maybe someday I'll find a legal copy on eBay - or keep it on the grounds that even the artist him/her/themselves probably doesn't give a darn???)
One 100% legal source of a bountiful music library was close at hand, however - my CD collection. Fortunately, it is legal to copy your own legally-purchased CDs to your computer and iPod - at least in the United States. The music industry wouldn't have minded this going the other way, however; they love to get people to buy the same music over and over, on vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, digitally-remastered collector's-item CD, MiniDisc, audio DVD, and finally by digital download in a legal Internet store like iTunes or Napster 2.0. In this way, they profit from each new technology that comes along. But, ironically, the same entertainment industry also almost invariably attempts to get the courts and legislatures to ban every new technology that comes along, by calling it a tool for piracy. They took this approach with everything from player pianos to VCRs, fortunately almost always failing.
A landmark Supreme Court ruling 20 years ago said that "time shifting" of TV programs by VCR was legitimate fair use, and not a violation either for the consumer who did it or the VCR and blank tape manufacturers who facilitated it. Predictably, the corporate types of the entertainment world were at it again to try to ban first the MP3 format, then portable digital music players, for aiding in the "piracy" of music, in which category they were perfectly willing to put people transferring music from CDs to a more portable format for your own use, just like the movie industry demonized the act of taping a TV show to watch later when you had more free time; and fortunately they failed there too. No Supreme Court decision resulted, but lower courts indicated that the "space shifting" you could do with a portable digital music player was, most likely, just as legitimate as the "time shifting" you could do with a VCR, and the industry seems to have acquiesced. But in some other places, Australia for instance, they have made it expressly illegal to copy a CD even for your own use, and are reinforcing this ban by booby-trapping CDs with copy protection mechanisms that can sometimes interfere even with playing the CD on a computer. The ironic result is that, although the Australian band Jet has appeared in iPod commercials that aired both in the U.S. and Australia, there's no legal way for their domestic fans to listen to their music on an iPod - uploading the CD tracks is illegal and blocked by copy protection, but the iTunes download store, where one can pick up legal and iPoddable tracks including those of Jet, is available only in the U.S. Sorry, Australians!
One final legal note before I get back to practical matters: iPod and iTunes have provoked an "Apple v. Apple" lawsuit, as Apple Records is claiming that Apple Computer is violating an earlier settlement where the computer company promised to stay away from the music field in order to keep from infringing the trademark of the "other Apple", which was there first. This is at least the third time the two Apples have clashed, with each settlement being rendered untenable due to the ever-increasing convergence of the computer and entertainment industries. I have no idea how this will turn out, and I hope Apple [Computer] isn't abruptly forced out of anything related to music, leaving iPod owners in the lurch.
Back to business... Once I'd copied all of my CDs onto the iPod over a period of a few weeks (actually, the procedure is to "rip" them into the iTunes library on your computer, and then let them get uploaded to the iPod next time you "sync" it by plugging it into its dock), I had a sizable library of tracks, which I supplemented by a few purchases on the iTunes store. Not very many, however; it's just not a great deal at present, with the 99 cents per track being roughly equal to the cost of a CD, except that with a real CD you get high-quality uncompressed and usually un-copy-protected digital music stored on a physical medium that can survive a crash of your hard disk, along with cover art and liner notes. Given that the costs of distributing music online are bound to be much lower than shipping physical product, there's no logical reason other than the greed of entertainment executives why the per-track price can't be cut considerably. The use of proprietary, digital-rights-management (DRM) data formats by iTunes and other online music stores is also troublesome; it means that songs from competing music stores aren't compatible with the iPod, while iTunes songs aren't compatible with competing music players. This is distressing for somebody like myself who favors open-standard, nonproprietary data formats.
In all, the software now tells me that I have 2729 songs (it lies; some of these tracks aren't really songs at all, since I've imported everything from Berlitz language lessons to court arguments in the Supreme Court's "Betamax" case) totaling 7.6 solid days of audio and taking up 9.88 gigabytes. Yes... that's still only one quarter of the capacity of this 40 GB unit! Lots of interesting facts and statistics can be seen about my music library in the iTunes software, including how many times I've played each track and when I last played it (either on my PC or the iPod - every time you "sync" them, they exchange these statistics with one another to bring them up to date). You can sort by title, artist, album, genre, and release date, and set up playlists either manually or by automated criteria. For instance, one standard playlist is of your "top rated songs", determined by a rating of one to five stars you can give each track. (A tip: don't rate the songs like you're doing an Epinions review and want to give an objective assessment of their artistic merit - you're rating them for your own benefit, not that of others, so give ratings based on how much you want to hear each song. If you know that, artistically speaking, that Britney track really sucks, but dammit, you still love to hear it, don't feel guilty about giving it more stars than some classic work that you admit is a masterpiece of its field, but you just can't personally get into.)
When you insert a CD to import, iTunes will fetch some of this info (title, artist, year, etc.) from an Internet database which knows about most CDs and can recognize them by their contents. Practically every CD I had was in that database, even some really obscure ones, though the data wasn't always entirely correct. Being obsessive-compulsive, I put a lot of effort into fixing up the data in my library, correcting misspelled names and inserting correct dates for all tracks (the database tended to assign all tracks of a "greatest hits" CD to the year the CD came out, instead of the more useful individual release dates of the songs). With all of this correctly filled in, I can sort my library to see at a glance that the oldest track I've got is the 1924 recording of "Does The Spearmint Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight", by Ernest Hare And Billy Jones, from a Dr. Demento Basement Tracks CD; and that I've got four different versions of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" (performed by Andy Gibb, Debbie Gibson, Carole King, and Laura Branigan).
With all my music imported, labeled, and rated, now I can listen to the iPod for hours on end without repeating a song, or having to insert a new CD. The "My Top Rated" playlist, with only four- and five-star songs, has 563 songs for a total of 1.5 days of listening; I've never managed to get through the whole playlist without resetting the iPod, even though it does keep your place in the playlist in progress even when you turn it off, as long as you don't start playing something else or dock it to your computer. I've set it to "random shuffle", meaning that it picks songs at random from the chosen playlist (or artist or album). It's sort of like a personal radio station where I choose the playlist (instead of some corporate marketing idiots like real radio stations) - and there are no commercials!
While the "top-rated" playlist is the mainstay of my listening, sometimes I'm adventurous enough to pick the "Never Played" playlist, featuring the tracks that I haven't actually played since importing onto my iPod. There are still 1807 of them (5.1 days) at last check, and when I listen to some from that list, I often find songs I like - after all, they're from CDs I actually bought at some point (except for a few I won in contests or the like). There's plenty of stuff I like that nevertheless managed to gather dust on my CD shelf for years, until the iPod's random track shuffle brought it to my ears again. That's one of the neat things about the iPod.
A down side, however, is the lessening of exposure to new music that will likely occur when you immerse yourself in your existing music library this way. Without an iPod, you might actually listen to the radio sometimes, and perhaps hear a new song, maybe even by a new artist. Not that this is all that likely these days; corporate-controlled radio thinks it's safer just to play the same old stuff over and over. "Adult contemporary" stations think that more than a couple of new songs per year will overload the attention span of their listeners, while "Top 40" stations are too heavily into rap, hip-hop, and other genres that I just can't get into. (I tried to keep in touch with pop music through the '80s and '90s, as it drifted ever further from the '70s stuff I grew up with, but by now I've gone completely into old-fogeydom and can't recognize more than a handful of the Billboard Hot 100 these days.) Given those choices, I'd rather retreat to my own music library instead of a broadcasting corporation's, but I still lament the cutting-off from new stuff this engenders.
Another effect of the iPod and other digital music players is to bring about the downfall of the album in favor of the single track as the basic unit of music. The random play option shuffles the CDs completely, while the music download stores sell the music one song at a time. This is lamented by those who see the album as an art form in its own regard, pointing to some famous "concept albums" of the '60s and '70s. Others then counter by saying that, aside from those few cases, albums have tended to be a couple of hits surrounded by forgettable filler, so letting listeners pick out the "good stuff" isn't such a bad thing. At any rate, if albums die out in favor of singles, that'll only be the completion of a "full circle", since that's where the music industry started in the first place. Sheet music, player piano rolls, and 78 RPM records were all "singles". The first albums were collections of multiple 78 RPM records packaged in a binder - that's why they were called "albums". Later, the invention of the LP turned the album into a major medium, but the 45 RPM single was introduced around the same time and played a significant part in the early rock-n-roll era. Later attempts to revive the single in cassette and CD forms didn't do nearly so good (illogically high pricing can bear major blame for this), but digital music has brought it back stronger than ever.
Despite being created as a music player, the iPod does have a few more functions, found in the "Extras" menu. These include a calendar, address book, and storage of small text files with notes to myself. These things are read-only in the iPod - you need to do your editing on your computer - so the iPod isn't a substitute for a true PDA like a PalmPilot (if you're the sort who feels you need one), but it's still useful for reminding you of appointments and giving you access to reference info while you're on the go, as long as you can put up with not being able to take notes and add appointments until you get back to your computer. The iCal and vCard formats are used for calendars and addresses respectively; these are standardized formats supported by lots of software. In particular, the Mozilla browser's add-on calendar module (still in testing phases, but I'm adventurous enough to use it anyway) uses the iCal format, so I can send my calendar data straight to the iPod. People often attach vCards to e-mail messages, and I can put those directly on my iPod too. Unfortunately, only Mac software, to date, has functions to auto-sync datebooks and addresses with the iPod, but the PC can access the iPod as if it's an external hard drive, and all you have to do is put the files in an appropriate subdirectory - I wrote a batch file to do it, and now it's an easy matter for me to bring my data in sync.
Those "extra" features were, however, involved in a weird glitch I had with the iPod a few weeks after starting to use it. After docking it to the computer for an update, I found that the calendar, addresses, and notes were inaccessible; I got a screen that said something like "10 notes stored", but never proceeded to the menu where I could reach them. "Rebooting" (pressing a combination of buttons that works something like Ctrl-Alt-Del on a PC to force a restart) usually brought things back to normal, but they messed up again the next time I docked with the computer. Also, while the iPod was in this strange mode, other things acted oddly, including the battery, which tended to run out quickly, and show wildly inaccurate power levels on the indicator that's supposed to show the battery strength. When I asked about this at the Apple store, the guy there advised me to do a complete reinstall using the iPod system software downloadable from Apple's site. This basically wipes out everything, reformats the iPod's hard disk, and starts over. It sounds pretty drastic, but it's actually not that painful... it reformats pretty quickly for a 40 GB disk, and, if you've been using the default options on the iPod, the music library has been kept automatically synced with that in the iTunes library on the PC's hard drive, so no data is lost; it automatically reloads everything onto the iPod once you're finished reformatting.
After this, the iPod worked fine for a few days, then developed the same symptoms again. However, after the second reformatting, it's worked OK ever since (it's been a month since then). I still don't know what caused this to happen. I do have the slight "issue" that, from time to time, the iPod seems to "spontaneously reboot" - when I try to turn it on, instead of coming up with the menu immediately, it shows the Apple logo and takes a few seconds to start up after that. There's no harm to anything other than losing your place in a playlist if one was in progress, but it still disconcerts me when the iPod does anything strange for no good reason.
Other than that, it's been great... I'm enjoying parts of my music library I long ago forgot I had, in a portable device I can use at home, at work, while out for a walk, while on a plane (after takeoff, when they say you can use approved electronic devices), and now also in my car, since I've got an accessory to power it with the car's cigarette lighter (the only thing I, as a nonsmoker, ever do with it) and another to pretend to be a cassette and send the iPod's music to my car's stereo.
I also want to discuss the iPod's controls. At least on this model (earlier ones varied somewhat), control is by touch-sensitive buttons, and a "touch wheel", on the face of the iPod. A little too sensitive, I think; it's easy to activate features and controls you didn't want when you attempt to grab the iPod, or just bump into it. There's a switch on its side to protect the controls from accidental pressing, but of course this also makes it harder to control the iPod on purpose. Fortunately, this model comes with a "remote control" attached between the iPod and its earbuds, which lets you access common features like volume and pause. Once you've got it playing a good, long playlist, these are all the controls you need. The touch wheel took some trial and error on my part to learn how to use; I'd never used that sort of control before, and nothing in the manual explained it, so it took some poking and prodding to figure out the proper motions to use on it, which are of the sort that would be used to make it turn if it were actually a turnable wheel, even though it actually lacks moving parts.
Regarding those earbuds... it's supposedly trendy in some circles to be seen with those distinctive white iPod things in your ears (though I guess I don't move in the right circles myself... they haven't enhanced my social status yet as far as I know). However, they come with black "fuzzy" covers to make them more comfortable (but doesn't this make them look less "trendy"?). It doesn't matter anyway; those covers have too much of a tendency to fall off and get lost. Apple seems to know this, since they give you four earbud covers when you only have two ears. I've already lost two of them, and the others have been lost and found several times too. Eventually, I gave up using the covers altogether. I hear that some people are forsaking the earbuds in favor of higher-quality but less trendy-looking earphones, and I further hear that there are reports of people getting mugged by iPod thieves targeting them due to the distinctive look, so there may be practical benefits for switching to a different earphone; I'm still using the normal earbuds at this point, however.
Anyway, though there have been a few little glitches, I love my iPod, and hope to figure out ways of filling some of its remaining gigabytes without going broke using the iTunes store, or starting a life of crime by joining the P2P pirates. Thanks, Apple and Mom!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 500
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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Epinions.com ID:
dtobias
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Member: Daniel Tobias
Location: Boca Raton, FL
Reviews written: 168
Trusted by: 97 members
About Me:
A programmer and Internet developer who's been a "computer geek" for over 20 years now.
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