iPod Reaction
It may come as a surprise to those of you who remember my post “Tech Monopolies”, but I finally joined the hip, silhouetted masses and bought myself a 40GB iPod photo. Having had a month or so to acquaint myself with my new favorite toy, I’ve got quite a few comments to make.
User Interface - Let me just get this one out of the way. The click-wheel input on the iPod is the coolest thing on Earth. It’s so easy to use and intuitive that the mini joysticks found on many other portable music players seem archaic by comparison. Where’s the radio? - What the iPod has in coolness, it lacks in extra features. One of the most glaring omissions is an FM radio. While many view this as a cheap add-on, to me it’s something that’s such an obvious thing to include in a portable audio system that it’s a bit puzzling that it isn’t automatically included in every mp3 player. Rather than make the radio the rarely-used option that nobody ever uses, I’d love to see Apple take the TIVO-concept and apply it to the iPod. Imagine how cool it would be to “subscribe” to your favorite radio shows, rewind live radio to re-hear or record a cool song you just heard, or store mp3s of the crazy shit you hear on talk radio? Considering that the iPod never turns itself off (it’s usually in “sleep” mode) all of this should be fairly easy to implement and would add change the way people listen to the radio forever. The ability to fast-forward through radio commercials alone would be worth the few bucks it might add to the system cost.
Organization Issues - While I’m glad to see that the iPod has a menu for audiobooks, the process for getting an audiobook to actually show up in that menu is a big pain in the ass. For example, if you have an mp3 of an audiobook, you have to use iTunes to convert it to AAC format, rename the resulting files from *.m4a to *.m4b, and then reimport the files into your iTunes library. And that’s just audiobooks. Now it’s obvious that users should have the ability to drag and drop files into this folder, but what about other audio files that users may want to organize outside of their music libraries? Wouldn’t it be nice for iTunes to allow user-created subcategories for radio shows, comedy albums, spoken word, and podcasts?
Default behavior - This one’s a little nitpicky, but this is a little pet peeve of mine. Unlike many users, I listen to shuffle for a few minutes just to figure out what sort of mood I’m in. Once I find an album I want to hear, I go back to the main menu, into the artists menu, etc.. When going through these menus, each one starts at the top rather than skipping directly to the artist / album / song that’s currently in “Now Playing”. Not a big deal, but when you’ve got 600+ artists on there, it can cause a lot of unnecessary scrolling. And speaking of all those artists, the iPod is missing a vital feature that’s currently part of iTunes, the ability to “group compilations when browsing”. Being able to lump all your compilation albums together really helps eliminate the clutter. Don’t get me wrong, I like the 13th Floor Elevators and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, but I don’t need them at the top of my artists list.
Shuffle “Moods” - We’ve all encountered computerized randomizers that seem to get into moods. While I find this refreshing in a way, it’s pretty improbable that a truly random selection of songs would include the same artist as often as the iPod seems to. At the risk of getting into geek territory here, this is because computers aren’t really capable of “true” random number sequences. Having multiple algorithms or changing the random seed often would probably increase the randomness of the shuffle output, but since most people are pretty happy with the way shuffle works I’m probably being more nerdy than I need to. Developer Friendliness - If you want to play your iPod through an FM radio, the iTrip is a pretty cool accessory. It’s prominent placement on Apple’s iPod accessories page is the closest thing to an official endorsement that the iTrip is likely to get, but at the end of the day, the device is just a hack by third-party developers into a system that doesn’t have any interest in being expandable. How else can you explain the fact that getting the iTrip to work requires selecting an FM frequency mp3 from a playlist, waiting for the red light on the unit to start blinking, hitting pause before the mp3 stops playing, and then picking the music you want to hear. A developer-friendly iPod would allow users to avoind jumping through these hoops by adding an “FM Output” option to the Setup menu somewhere. C’mon Apple…open things up a little bit. Provide APIs into the firmware, develop an SDK, and let third-parties add to the value of your products.
All this having been said, the iPod is still in my eyes the best portable music player on the market. While I’d love to see some of my suggestions be implemented, I’m not holding my breath. After all, when Apple owns the market, there’s not much economic incentive to innovate. Especially when the direction they’re headed with the brand is towards photo and possible video support rather than further honing the audio side of their product.
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As far as shuffle “Moods” goes, on my iPod I do the same thing that I do when listening to iTunes.
I have created a smart playlist on both called “Unplayed” that is set to contain only songs that have a play count of “0″, and I just shuffle from that playlist.
I don’t know about algorithms, but this method ensures that I never hear the same song twice?ever?as once it’s been played, it’s automatically removed from the smart playlist.
Comment by Guav — March 28, 2005 @ 2:36 pm
For your Organization pet peeve, you might want to try creating some Smart Playlists to automatically organize your audio. They’re a really handy way of sorting through everything in your library. Check out the site www.smartplaylists.com for some cool examples.
One of my favorite lists takes songs that I’ve rated at least 4 stars but haven’t listened to in 3 months. That gives me a list of music that I really like, but haven’t heard in a while. You can break this down further by genre, year, artist, etc.
Comment by AsgardTex — March 28, 2005 @ 2:38 pm
http://www.ipodlounge.com/
That’s the joint.
Comment by Shabaas — March 28, 2005 @ 2:53 pm
The iPod just doesn’t cut it for me for 3 reasons…
1) it doesn’t mount as a regular removable drive to transfer my music
2) it only plays mp3 and aac files
3) it has no FM radio
The problem is, no one has created the perfect player for me yet. The closest was the iRiver iHP-120, which of course was discontinued as soon as I decided I’d like one. But it still has the problem of not supporting FLAC files. If I have a player 20+ GB, i want it to play FLAC. I’ll probably end up with nomad zen micro, as it’s the closest to what I want. I would also consider the iAudio m3, if I could only find someone who owned one.
Comment by Andrew — March 28, 2005 @ 3:33 pm
You totally CAN do TIVO on your ipod. I assume your an apple owner? Here is the next big thing after blogs. Podcasting! You need the software here. The “lite” version is free. Then go to podcast alley.
One subscription I HIGHLY recommend is IT conversations. I have other hints and tips regularly on my blog
Comment by Reality Bites — March 28, 2005 @ 3:35 pm
Well, it does mount as a removable drive for file transfers (which I’ve used quite a bit), but you’re right about not being able to drag and drop songs without using iTunes or some other program. I believe part of the reason is that the iPod keeps a database of the music on disk and that the music software is necessary to ensure that this database is updated.
I also think that this is part of their anti-piracy stance for the same reason you can’t move music from your iPod as easily as you can move it to the iPod. Rather than put the music in organized folders like iTunes, the iPod keeps the music in a hidden folder (at least on the Windows formatted version) at /iPod_Control/Music/. Grabbing music from there is a cool little trick, but, like you said, you can’t just drop a bunch of mp3s in there and start listening.
Yeah, this kinda sucks and is another great reason why I wish their firmware was upgradable. I don’t really have much music in WMA, OGG, or SHN formats, so I’m not that bothered by it though.
Ummm…there’s a huge difference between podcasting and recording live radio. While I think it’s cool that some traditional radio shows have made themselves available as podcasts, I’d still prefer to record anything I can pick up over the airwaves.
Comment by greg — March 28, 2005 @ 3:58 pm
Not having a radio is why I haven’t bought one yet. And I need AM and FM so I can listen to talk radio and grind my teeth all day…
Comment by jimmarquis — March 28, 2005 @ 5:48 pm
for recording live audio, if you are a Mac user you can use Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro software to record live web, radio or any other broadcast you like.
Comment by cali_ — March 29, 2005 @ 7:45 am
Tivo-ing the radio…
Now that I’m conditioned to watching television on TiVo, I don’t know how many times a day I’m listening to NPR in the car and my hand flinches on the wheel because I want to hear something again…”what did they say?…”
Comment by Mr Furious — March 29, 2005 @ 8:12 am
Unfortunately, you’re never going to see a portable player with an AM reciever. If you really want to know why just google for AM antenna’s and see for yourself.
You are correct. Of course the players that allow drag and drop, just do a quick scan of the filesystem and insert the new files into the database when ever a file is transferred. It makes for a delay when turning the thing on or transfering a file, but to me it’s a good trade off.
Comment by Andrew — March 29, 2005 @ 8:31 am
Ill see your geeky…
Most people tend to think of random as being less “clumped” than it really is. If you ask someone to produce a random series of heads and tails, they will include far too few runs of all heads or all tails. I think the iPod is probably closer to random than you think. You are right that it is difficult to produce true random sequences, but I think the computers are good enough that “fake” random and true random are almost indistinguishable.
Comment by TJon — March 29, 2005 @ 9:17 am
Computers are awful at generating random numbers. Every one who’s ever taken a computer science class can tell you that. At best they provide a pseudo-random number. To actually get a true random number, you need some source of entropy to use as the seed for your generator. A computer by design is a bad place to look for entropy. At best you take some very small measurement of time from the system clock, or the length of time of the last file, or the value of the byte of data at location X in the last file accessed. None of them are really good.
Comment by Andrew — March 29, 2005 @ 10:38 am
The 13th Floor Elevators and the 1910 Fruitgum Company actually ARE at the top of my artists list.
Comment by dAnimal — March 29, 2005 @ 10:41 am
I definitely agree that an AM/FM receiver is a no-brainer, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why Apple hasn’t developed one yet. As far as a TiVo-like add-on, that might get a little complicated when it comes to rights issues, if nothing else due to the climate in the record industry these days.
Comment by Briantologist — March 29, 2005 @ 1:20 pm
The Tivo like functions should have no rights issues. Fair use says that we can tape the radio as long as you don’t redestribute. That has been proven in court before. Almost all the players that have FM radios allow recording of the signals, adding the tivo like functionality wouldn’t be so hard.
AM is simply not going to happen. An AM antenna just won’t fit inside an iPod like device, and even if it could would pick up way too much noise from the internal circuts.
Comment by Andrew — March 29, 2005 @ 2:36 pm
sigh … i know the feeling. i have heard many good things about this little fella, plus i love playing with inline remotes.
Comment by adi — March 29, 2005 @ 5:01 pm
the iPod doesn’t need to generate anything. All it would have to do is be programmed with a list of 10,000 random numbers and march through them each time shuffle is played, using the number to pick the song. Once it gets to the end of the list it could start over. This time it could alternate adding or subtracting 10 from the numbers. Next time add and subtract 20, etc. Even if it did generate the numbers and only came up with pseudo random, I still doubt people would be able to intuit the difference from the songs they hear. My point was, people don’t have a good innate sense of what random is. If you had 30 people in a room, would you be surprised if 2 of them had the same birthday? 365 days in the year, 30 people, the odds seem slim, right? You shouldn’t be surprised though, becuase the odds of that happening by chance are greater than 70%. People think random sequences are more dispersed (less clumped) than they actually are. It doesn’t matter how bad computers are at random numbers, people are likely to be worse.
Comment by TJon — March 30, 2005 @ 9:51 am