Ipod Shuffle

Just recently, I've started listening to podcasts with an IPod Shuffle. This is a very low end device. I picked mine up for $80. I considered getting an iRiver for $150, that also has a microphone and FM tuner, but funds have been low. The device is tiny. It looks like a pack of gum. It comes with a cord attached to a USB cap, so you can hang it around your neck, but there is also a cap without a chord, making the chord optional.

The Shuffle has no display. Well, there is an led that glows green, yellow or red, showing the current battery state. Green for full charge, red for nearly dead, and yellow for in between. The non-replaceable lithium ion battery is supposed to last 18 hours on a charge. The battery is charged by plugging it into a computer USB port. The Shuffle goes from empty to full charge in three or four hours. The 512 MB should give you about ten hours of high quality mp3 music. I get more audio, because the books I listen to are in mono, and spoken text compresses better than music, probably because silence compresses so well. I've had 28 hours of podcasts on it.

The end of the shuffle comes off, revealing a USB port. Plug the shuffle into your computer, and use the computer to copy data onto it, and delete stuff from it. The shuffle mounts as a disk drive, and arbitrary files can be placed there for data movement. I still carry a USB drive for moving data, but have used the Shuffle for this once or twice. The upshot is that you need a computer for the user interface for putting stuff onto the drive and removing it. There isn't space enough on it to put your entire CD collection, so you'll need to do this fairly frequently. For me, there is something to do every day, as I'm not listening to a daily podcast.

There are some buttons on the Shuffle. There is the off/sequential/shuffle switch. The device is either off, plays tracks sequentially, or plays them in random order. There is a play/pause button. That is, if it is currently playing, this button causes it to pause, and if it is paused, it will play. Of course, you can't tell if it is playing or not if the sound file has silence. Many of the podcasts and audio book tracks start with a few seconds of silence, and therefore, it isn't clear if it is playing or not. You just have to listen longer. It helps if the volume is high enough to hear it.

There is a four switch circular button. Press left to go to the previous track. Press left and hold it for a second or so to rewind in chunks. The Shuffle plays little snippets, each chunk further back in time. Press right to get to the next track. If you are in shuffle mode, it goes to a new random track. Press right and hold for a few seconds, and the Shuffle fast forwards, playing little snippets. Press up and the sound volume increases. Press down and the sound volume decreases.

And that would be it for the pack of gum. But this totally trivial user interface has some hidden unexpected behavior. For example, you can not play audio on the Shuffle while it is connected to a computer. This isn't much of an issue. My Linux computer OS has a utility that can play the mp3 tunes from the Shuffle while it is mounted. So, while the Shuffle can't play, the host computer can play those tunes right where they are.

One typically pauses the audio, then turns the Shuffle off. Since I often listen to books sequentially, it is important that I get back to where I was when I turn it back on. Sometimes, it forgets where I ended up, and it starts at the same place it started the last time. This can be many tracks ago, and I have no idea how many tracks. In particular, if the tracks have no silence at the start or end, there is no break between tracks in playback. There can be no indication at all that you are now on a new track. Also, when it forgets where you were, it also forgets what the volume setting you had was. So, if you had it on loud for the car, it can blast you at your desk. The guess is that one should wait a few seconds between pausing the audio and turning the unit off. That seems to reduce the frequency of this odd behavior to acceptable levels.

Since there is such a limited user interface, it is not a good device if you have more than one thing to listen to. For example, if you have 100 tracks of a book, and three podcasts to listen to, it can be maddening to listen to a podcast, and then try to navigate to track 56. I periodically delete tracks from my current book so that this isn't a problem. I also arrange the tracks so that the book is all the first tracks, and the podcasts are at the end. There are usually only a few.

The fast rewind feature stops at the beginning of the track. It will not proceed to the previous track. This is good if you want to find the beginning of the current track. Finding the beginning of the track can be done by skipping to the previous track, then skipping forward to the beginning of the current track. So this isn't as handy as it sounds. Still, it isn't entirely redundant, especially, if you've never heard the tracks in question. It isn't so hot if what you want to do is get toward the end of the previous track. In fact, you must go to the beginning of the previous track and fast forward to near the end. But there is no way to know that you are near the end if you've never heard it before.

The Shuffle is an odd sort of duck. The user interface is minimalistic, and a computer is required. There is no A/C charger, a computer is required to charge it. It is incredibly small. Even ear bud headphones are bigger. What makes it awesome is that what it does, it does very well. The sound quality is great. You may take this for granted, but for example, typical PC sound cards vary from useless to pretty good, and even sound cards on name brand computers can have erratic quality. From Apple, however, the sound is good or it doesn't go out the door. I suspect that they perform some sort of quality control test. What a concept.

I plug it into my stereo and listen to it over breakfast. Then I plug it into my car stereo's aux port, and continue where i left off. Then I plug headphones into it and walk across parking lots to work. So why didn't I do all this with my Walkman? Well, mainly because it takes a few seconds to fill it with hours of audio, where it takes an hour to record an hour of audio on a tape. Yet, I never spent an hour writing about the Walkman. I did use the Walkman in the car, through the aux port in the car stereo. That let me listen to something other than CDs. And, it was more convenient than ripping the tapes to CD by playing the tapes into my computer's sound card.

The upshot is that I no longer want a CD or tape player in my car. A simple AM/FM radio with an Aux port for my shuffle will do fine. But, you say, what about the round trip from Michigan to Florida? That's 19 hours each way. Well. I guess I'll just have to hook up to a computer when I get there.