The Best - Nothing Else Is Even Close

I’m sitting on an airplane, listening to my 15GB Ipod, basically in a world of my own (the New York Times calls it an “Ipod Cocoon”). I have created my own personal radio station, complete with my 3,5000 favorite songs. I play them randomly, and the Ipod accommodates me. If I want to add songs, I go to itunes.com and get them for 99 cents each or I buy a new CD. The whole process is so easy, I’m still amazed by it.

When I first started looking at MP3 players six months ago, I decided that the Ipod was too expensive, so I bought Creative Labs Nomad Zen, which cost about $100 less. However, after wrestling with it for a few weeks, I returned it. The software didn’t work, the player kept crashing, and the controls were illogically placed. That extra $100 turned out to be extremely well spent, as the Ipod is well thought out, easy to use either on a PC or a Mac, very light and very attractive to boot. The ipod is the market leader for a reason.

The 15GB ipod holds several thousand songs, and it supports AAC, a better format than MP3 that provides better quality while compressing the songs into a smaller size, so you can fit more songs onto the ipod. Controls are easy to use and well thought out. To play, you hit the play button on the front of the device. Other buttons, which are familiar to any audio user, include skip forward, move backward, stop, and menu, which also activates the backlight on the screen. To change the volume, you simply use slide your fingers along the circular “thumbwheel” on the front of the device. Hit the middle of the thumbwheel to move to the next level of the hierarchical menu system. A hold button on top of the Ipod prevents accidental changes to the volume or other settings.

A black and white screen shows the song playing, the album that it’s on, what song number it is, battery life, and how much time is remaining. Hit the center button and you can rate the song your listening to on a scale of one to five.

Steps to using an Ipod:

Ripping songs onto the Ipod. My Ipod is a third generation model, so it includes a dock and a connector that plugs into either the USB or Firewire ports on your computer. The Ipod will work with USB 1.1 ports, but don’t use it. USB 1.1 is 40 times slower than USB 2 or Firewire. It’s basically unusable in this environment. If you have USB 1.1, spend $35 or so and upgrade to USB 2.0 or Firewire. The cards are easy to install. You also need Windows 2000 or Windows XP on the PC side or a Mac running OS X. I switched from a PC to a Mac a few months ago and the experience was exactly the same on the Mac as the PC.

To rip songs, download Itunes (you can also use Musicmatch on the PC, but it’s not as good of a music player) from the Apple website. Make sure you have the latest version. Itunes is free. At this writing, the latest version is 4.2. Then, put a CD into your drive and click Import (you can also set Itunes to automatically begin importing when you put a CD in the drive). Itunes puts the songs on your hard drive in the folder that you select. To get the songs on the Ipod, simply plug the Ipod into the Dock (or use a cable to connect it to either the Firewire or USB port). Itunes automatically updates the Ipod. If the Ipod is already plugged in, select “Update Ipod” from the Itunes menu. Then, eject the Ipod and you’re ready to go.

Depending on the speed of your computer and your CD drive, it takes a few to several minutes to rip a CD onto your computer. After all, each CD has many megabytes of data on it that has to be copied and compressed into the correct format. Plus, I turned error correction on to make sure that no errors like song skips were introduced during the process. On my 1.25 Ghz Imac, it takes about five minutes per CD. On my 600 Mhz Dell, it took more like 10-15 minutes per CD. Copying my entire 250 CD collection onto my Ipod took several days.

Using the Ipod – I bought an Extremac adapter system that lets me use the Ipod in my car, through a cassette adapter. It also includes a charger that works in the car. This is phenomenal and has basically made my CD player in my car useless. No need for a changer, I have a 250 CD player that weighs a few ounces!

One word of caution on car adapters: Our other car doesn’t work with cassette adapters, as the cassette player in the car will not tolerate an adapter, it keeps ejecting it, thinking it’s at the end of the tape. So, we bought an iTrip for our other car, which works via FM. The itrip works fairly easily, but at much lower fidelity than a cassette adapter. Plus, if you live in a congested metropolitan area with lots of FM stations, you’ll have a hard time finding an empty frequency to use.

I also use the Ipod with headphones. I didn’t like the earbuds that came with the Ipod, because I don’t like earbuds in general. I prefer headphones. So, I switched to the Sennheiser PX-200 portable headphones, available for $30 to $40 if you shop around online. These are great!

You can also hook the ipod up to your stereo at home, but I haven’t done this, although I do have the adapters to do so.

Best Features of the Ipod

Ease of use – As mentioned, it’s intuitive.
Small size and weight – It’s so light, it’s amazing there is a large hard disk attached to it.
Apple Service – My hard disk crashed on the Ipod, so I filed out a form on Apple’s website, they sent me a kit by overnight express. I sent the kit back to Apple’s repair center and THREE DAYS LATER I received my Ipod, repaired and as good as new. Amazingly good and easy.
Accessories – There are a blindingly large number of accessories for the Ipod from a large number of vendors. I typically check out the Apple Store (online and in person), as well as a variety of web sites and magazines looking for new items that can enhance the Ipod even more.
Fidelity – Most important feature, really. It sounds great! The Ipod provides high fidelity sound thanks to AAC, which blows away mp3.
Itunes – The best music software by far. All of the others are just imitators. Besides the Itunes store, which is getting better all the time, my favorite feature is playlists. I like to set up playlists for different moods or just for fun. I have playlists that include only songs about traveling, others that include songs about drinking, love songs, playlists by artist, and others. You can also set up playlists that automatically create themselves as you rip songs. For example, I have a playlist that automatically adds every song written by Bob Dylan as it is ripped.

It's also nice to get in touch with your old music. I'm listening to songs that I bought years ago and haven't heard in ages. Without the Ipod, it's unlikely that I would have put those CDs in my CD player.

Price has come down – You can now get a 15GB Ipod for $299 (or less if you shop around). While still more than some competitors, what do those competitors offer that Apple doesn’t have? Dell’s claim to fame on their jukebox – battery life. OK, that’s important, but is it the main reason that you buy one of these devices?
Multiple Ipods/Multiple libraries – With OS X Panther, and also with Windows XP, you can set up different desktops for users in your family. We have two Ipods in ours and since my music taste is different than others in my family, it’s important that their Ipods have different songs. Easily done. Simply set up Itunes libraries in each users account. Each user’s Ipod will sync with the Itunes on their desktop.

Negatives
The biggest negative on the Ipod is battery life. It only lasts for a few hours per charge (3-4). That is very frustrating, particularly on a cross country flight.
Another negative is the fact that the ipod syncs only one way. So, when I switched from the PC to the Mac, I had to make sure that all my songs were on an external hard disk that I copied to the Mac before I synced the Ipod with it. Otherwise, the songs would have been lost. In reality, I lost the songs anyway, thanks to an early Panther bug that erased the data from external hard drives. So, I had to rip the songs again. The sliver lining in this is that my old computer had a lousy CD-ROM drive, so the songs weren’t of the highest quality and some of them skipped. Plus, AAC wasn’t supported on Windows at the time, so all the songs were in mp3.
Display – The display is hard to read. I’d like a higher resolution color display, but that of course, would make already bad battery life worse.
Incompatability – You can’t use the Ipod with other jukeboxes or with other music services online. This limits the number of songs you can download, since the Itunes store is not comprehensive by any means (although it’s getting better all the time).

Other Features
There are other features of the Ipod that I haven’t mentioned here because I don’t use them. I see no value in the remote control, for example, because it’s connected to the Ipod via a cord. Also, since I don’t like the display, I find the calendar and games on the Ipod of dubious value. The Ipod is not a PDA (although I’d love it if Apple made one).

Bottom line – The Ipod is the best digital jukebox currently on the market. A lot of companies are going to come after Apple to take market share away, and I’m sure some of them will succeed. For example, I’m anxious to see what Sony comes up with in this arena. Still, Apple is very hard to beat in innovation and style. Plus, Ipod is their most successful product, by far.

I’m sure we’ll see color Ipods and other innovative products from Apple over the next year or so. The Ipod mini, for example, is innovative, but very overpriced. We’ll see if everyone else can keep up.