Posted by Jim at March 12th, 2005

I mentioned earlier that I had ordered an iPod Shuffle. I received it early Wednesday morning–one of the great benefits of telecommuting being that you can be there when the Fedex guy arrives.

I bought the 1GB shuffle instead of the 512MB, largely because I’ve never been in a situation with electronics in which I’ve ever wished for less memory, but often been in situations in which I’ve wished for more. I chose the Shuffle as opposed to the mini or the original iPod largely because I enjoy running and doing things outdoors. The Shuffle’s less likely to be damaged in the process.

Secondarily, I thought it might be nice to use it for sitting and listening to music, but since I work at home, I’ve got access to my stereo and entire music library and didn’t see that as a necessity.

Here are some observations now that I’ve used it for a few days:
–When you’re on a busy street passing vehicle noise tends to take out the bass and drums unless you turn up the volume pretty loud. Too be fair, this can happen with car stereos too.
–iTunes is much more pleasant to deal with when ripping mp3’s than Realplayer.
–The Shuffle integrates well with iTunes. Moving music around is surprisingly easy.
–Downloading (via iPodder) podcasts is pretty easy to do as well.
–1GB holds a lot of mp3’s. Though I know that other mp3 players hold more music, I can’t imagine myself listening to an mp3 player long enough (18 hours) to hear all the music more than once and thus I don’t feel like I’m going to have to upgrade any time soon.
–Differing mp3 volumes can be a bit of a pain when you’re outside. Classical music (with it’s greater dynamic range) is particularly bad for this. You can be listening to the Wallflowers, happily hearing every single note and then suddenly there’s no music and you find yourself wondering whether the player still works. It does, but now it’s playing a soft part of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” At that point you pump up the volume and soon after that the music SWELLS to ear pounding levels of pain. Again, I have this happen in the car too.

That’s one thing I remember from being a DJ back in college. I constantly had to watch the sound level when playing classical on the air because it would dip under the point at which people could actually hear.

And then you’ve got dead air, a cardinal sin even in college radio.

More observations:
–Listening to music in random order does revitalize certain albums for me. I’ve listened to certain cd’s in my collection much too often. I still like the music, even love the music in some cases, but I just can’t bear to play the album straight through. Oddly enough, music from that same album following a piece from a completely different cd is something I can enjoy.
–As for the much pointed out fact that the Shuffle has no display… I agree and disagree. When I’m sitting down listening to music, I sometimes find myself thinking that I wish I knew what song I was listening to. When I’m running outside or (as of this morning) shoveling snow, I have no need to look at the display. Bearing in mind that I bought the Shuffle for doing things outside, I can deal with the lack of display.

At the moment, I’m happy to have bought it. We’ll see what I think in a few weeks.