Last week, a dear friend asked me if I had an iPod. I told her I did not. She knows that I like to listen to lectures and interviews and so does she. She told me that numerous interviews can be downloaded for free through Apple’s iTunes site. She gave me a tour of the site and convinced me that you can, indeed, download thousands upon thousands of intriguing sounding interviews from NPR and numerous other sources.
She saw that I was intrigued with this possibility. She also knew that I ride a bike to work and I therefore was not able to listen to live radio during my commute. She suggested that if I had an iPod, I could listen to all kinds of interesting things as I pedal to to work. In fact, she went so far as to ask me whether I would promise to use an iPod if she gave me one. I said “sure.” She ducked into the next room and emerged with a small box containing an iPod Shuffle [1], a device that is about as big as a postage stamp. The shuffle holds 20 hours of music or interviews in its 1 GB memory. The tiny kit comes with a charger/USB port that allows you to drag tunes and interviews into the Shuffle through the use of the iTunes interface. It is all incredibly slick and easy to use. I accepted this tiny though generous gift, only half-expecting it to work when I got home (it just seemed to small to do the things that it supposedly did).
But work it did, and the Shuffle is now a regular part of my life. I “subscribe” to numerous news and information sources and I drag these interviews and speeches into my Shuffle. I have also imported a dozen of my musical CDs into iTunes and then dragged many of those songs onto the Shuffle as well. The Shuffle does not have a display, but it has transport controls that are easily operated by your finger. I don’t yet know how long the battery lasts, but I’ve been playing music for two hours at a time without a problem-perhaps it will go a lot longer than even that. The musical fidelity is outstanding. The Shuffle comes with two earbuds which fit comfortably into the ears. Truly, I don’t make a dime off of Apple products but I’m writing this post because I am so incredibly impressed by this technology. By the way, the Shuffle kit costs only $79. The Apple’s iTunes software is free. Within 30 minutes of opening the Shuffle, you will be almost an expert at using iTunes along with your Shuffle.
Today I was listening to jazz while riding a light rail train. I was noticing all the people milling around at the station while I privately listened to George Gershwin compositions. It was then that it occurred to me that the high fidelity music I was listening to was making everything I saw seem like a transitional scene in a movie. It was a bit disorienting. It made life seem like a movie, except everything was a transitional scene and there were no talking parts, because I could not really hear them with music playing. While listening to music, everything you notice takes on the ambience of your music. It’s the same effect that you can see in this comedy piece, a takeoff on Mary Poppins. [2] Then again, if you’re playing happy music, those non-orchestrated scenes of people you notice on the trains and in the train stations all look much happier than they otherwise look.
Another thing was quite different for me. While listening to music or interviews on the Shuffle, I have made myself inaccessible to everyone around me. Although I don’t try to go out of my way to communicate with people I don’t know who happened to be sitting on a train, it sometimes happens that I sometimes traded comments with someone sitting near me. That doesn’t happen while you are wearing earbuds, however. When you’re occupied with the music, you might as well put a sign on your shirt, “I’m busy. Don’t talk to me.”
So yes, I’ve fallen in love with this tiny gadget that allows me the option of withdrawing from the crowd even when I’m among the crowd. It allows me to listen to part of an interview when I’m actually falling asleep at night. It allows me to hear brilliant lecturers wherever I happen to be at the time.
Well, one thing led to another. My family has more than 700 musical CDs at the house, we often play them in a CD player. The CD cases often get separated from the CDs, leading to the need to sort things out. Further, sometimes the CDs are not place on the shelves in the right order. In short, we have an unwieldy musical CD collection. It’s so unwieldy that the $249 80 GB iPod started making sense to me today. The spec sheet indicates that this iPod will hold 20,000 songs, which I assume to be more or less 2000 musical CDs. It will hold every CD I family owns. All we got a do is download that music onto the hard drive of our computer (and, of course, back it up [3]). At that point, we can put the CDs in a big box and put it down the basement. Who is going to load all those CDs into the family’s desktop computer? Well, I’ve got two young daughters who might be willing to do all this work for a little bit of spending money. We’ll see . . .
With the iPod, you can dial up your favorite group or your favorite genre of music and play these in straight order or in the shuffled order. No more lost the CDs and no more piles of CD cases lacking the CDs. Goodbye musical CDs and hello desperately needed shelf space.
A couple of friends have asked me why I didn’t have an iPod prior to this point. They both asked, “Weren’t you the guy who always wanted to have the latest gadget regarding computers?” To the extent that was true, it was true many years ago, prior to the point that I decided that I wanted to start being in the second wave of consumers that discovered gadgets. I didn’t need to be the first person in line, because I do one of sit there trying to work out the bugs. The iPod is a case in point. The price of an iPod has fallen dramatically in the storage space has grown incredibly. The net result is that you can now get tiny technology that would of been worth millions of dollars only a couple decades ago.
For those of you who already know about the iPod, this post will seem a bit naïve. For those of you who have never tried to use an iPod, I think you will be amazed, as I am, at the iPod’s elegant design and terrific functionality.
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