click to enlarge
MP3 music compression has been around for a few years now, and it's staggeringly popular. Around the MP3 phenomenon are large industry has sprung up - a massive MP3 trading scene with Napster, AudioGalaxy, Gnutella, et al, MP3 components for home stereos, MP3 car stereos, DVD players that contain MP3 play capability, mobile phones that can store and play MP3 files, thousands of MP3 applications for practically every computer platform that can emit sound and finally, personal MP3 players. MP3 walkmans, if you will.
There's been quite a few portable MP3 players that have been roaming around the market in the last few years, all with the same fundamental flaw: lack of space. For the most part, the media used to store the MP3 files is flash memory. The amount can range from a paltry 8mb all the way up to the biggest memory card you can find, if your player can take an extra card. Otherwise you're stuck with whatever the manufacturer felt was sufficient for your listening needs.
There were a couple of portable CD players that could utilize burnt CD's which contained MP3 files, but this would give you perhaps 150 tracks, at most. And all serious MP3 collectors have much large collections than that.
So what's needed is something that is portable, can hold a massive amount of tracks, looks kinda sexy and can play MP3's.
Enter the Apple iPod.
Look, look, I know it's an Apple product, but just read the rest of the article, okay? Okay.
nbsp;
What we've got here is a small, portable MP3 player with FireWire connectivity, a standard audio 3.5mm jack port, a hold/lock slider switch, 32mb of memory, a 5GB hard drive, a backlit LCD and a slick user interface. Oh, and it also can be used as a boring portable high speed external storage device. Excellent.
One small, niggling little issue is that FireWire is hardly standard on PC's these days. In fact, I've only seen one computer that came with it standard and that was an expensive dual Xeon workstation from Dell, on which you'd expect FireWire to be provided, along with a cigarette lighter and electric aerial. We'll come back to the issue of connectivity and PCs later, but trust me, it is possible. Otherwise it'd be kinda pointless, my telling you how good the iPod is, wouldn't it?
And good it is. The first thing you notice when picking the iPod up is how light it is. 185 grams is the quoted weight from Apple, and while I didn't put it on the scales to see if it had been sneaking desserts, it sure won't be going to a fat farm any time soon. Suffice to say, it's got enough weight to feel like there's something in the oh-so-shiny casing, but it couldn't be described as feeling "hefty". It certainly won't drag your pocket down while you're dancing in public while waiting for a bus.
Most of the said weight could probably be attributed to three items: the 1.8" profile hard drive, the LCD and the 1200mAh lithium polymer battery. The battery gives 10 hours of listening pleasure, again according to Apple's specs for the iPod, but of course if you used the backlit on the LCD often, that time estimate would drop. The backlight, by the way, is a very nice cool blue-white and does the job well. With the 1000 songs that Apple claim you can fit onto the 5GB HDD you shouldn't get too bored during those 10 hours, either. I'm thinking they weren't factoring in 200MB trance mixes, but you know how big the "must have" portion of your collection is. 5GB is a non-trivial number of tracks to carry around with you, regardless.
When you've run out of juice to power your personal music pleasuring, there's two ways to recharge the device: via a wall socket 240v adapter that has a FireWire port, or you can plug it into a port on an operating computer and let it recharge its little heart out via FireWire. It also charges fairly fast, 3 hours being all that's needed to fully power up the battery.
While the iPod I got to play with already had MP3's on it, it's relatively simple getting your tracks on there in the first place. If you have a Mac, you'll be using their application, iTunes 2, which comes with the iPod, along with all new Macs. Using iTunes, you can move tracks and playlists between the Mac and the iPod, plus it allows you to synchronize your collection between the computer and the player, the Mac being used as the master list. The iPod will download all tracks that it doesn't contain and delete tracks the Mac itself doesn't have. Of course, you can move tracks over manually, and there are other options, but this is the default setup. If you connect the iPod to another Mac with iTunes 2, it will give you the option to set the new Mac as the new master list.
While we're on the subject of connecting the iPod to a Mac, when it is connected, the device is also recognized as another volume, which is neat, allowing you to drag and drop any files you could wish for. It works as a standard external hard drive, which is always a nice thing to have.
For connecting to a PC and sharing tracks, you'll require a 3rd Party application, such as Xplay, released by Mediafour. There is a rumour that Apple will be releasing iPod software for Windows machines, but considering that they're not suing Mediafour yet, they most likely may not. The software allows you to connect your iPod up to a PC (with FireWire, of course) and control your iPod in the same way that iTunes 2 does for Mac users, including editing your playlists. The software also includes an Apple filesystem driver for Windows, named MacDrive. This will allow you to connect your iPod to Macs and PCs alike, with arrogant ease.
Finally, it's time to listen to some music. The iPod comes with a white, standard-looking pair of bud style headphones, which feature, "Neodymium transducer magnets for high-fidelity sound". Ahuh. Well, I'll take Apple's word for it, but they seem to be better quality than your standard $15aud pair of bud headphones, and they come with the iPod, so what's not to like about them? They do bass quite well, and they're sharp and clear without sounding tinny in the upper ranges, but I'm not an audiophile by any means, so that's all I'm going to say about that.
If you don't like them, fine. It's a standard 3.5mm stereo jack, plug whatever you like into it. See if I care.
When you've got your headphones of choice on your head and near your ears, you'll want the music to start. Looking at the iPod, you'll see the LCD staring back at you, with four buttons (Menu, next track, previous track and play/pause) surrounding a rotary wheel, with a small blank button in the centre. The four outer buttons are standard audio control buttons, so I won't mention them, except for the fact that to cue through a track, you hold down the Next Track button. It's a standard feature of button-challenged audio devices, so let's move onto the wheel and the Button of Mystery.
The wheel has a dual function: as a scroll wheel, and as volume control when viewing the current track window. The wheel, when being used in its scroll mode makes a nice clicky noise, and is silent when in volume mode, but in both modes, it's unnaturally silky smooth. I was curious about what exactly was creating the pleasant click noise, but unfortunately I didn't have time to explore whether it was generated mechanically or not. The blank button in the middle of the wheel simply acts as Select, when navigating through the menus.
The iPod functions well when doing its thing, and should survive most (all) bumps and bangs. The 32mb of flash memory gives the unit approximately 20 minutes of buffer, which probably helps a bit in giving that tiny drive a break every now and then. It'll also help you butterfingered people out there.
I don't like the chances of the casing, though, if it was dropped. It's made of very shiny, clear plastic on top, and very, very shiny, non-clear metal on the bottom. The bottom gathers fingerprints like a hyperactive detective and the top will scratch with ease.
Conclusion:
The iPod is a sexy piece of kit that does its job almost flawlessly.
Its construction oozes quality, and although the casing material
could have been a bit better, it should survive most of the usual
geektoy rigors. It plays MP3's well, it's got a very simple and
intuitive control system, the supplied headphones do their job
and it'll play music for 10 hours before needing more power. It's
also got highspeed connectivity with the two major desktop computer
platforms, albeit, the PC side of things not being totally "FireWired"
yet. A FireWire card for your PC should cost about $80-100aud,
plus the PC software, XPlay is $40usd. Finally, it can also act
as an external hard drive. I've seen worse side benefits.
This brings us to the cost of the iPod. After all my playing and listening and giggling at the smoothness of the wheel, this is where I have to sigh forlornly, take off the headphones, press stop and hand back the iPod to it's rightful owner. At $895aud, I can't justify to myself spending that much money on this device, which is a true shame.
That being said, I like the iPod. It's simple, it's well made, it's well specced, and it does the job. Most importantly, it does the job without fuss. Thanks to Kurt for letting me play with it!
 RAID-0 Shootout ATA-100 vs ATA-133 |
 Apple Cooling |
 Lian-Li Case Window Kit |
