why i-pods are bad

ipod = good and sexy everything else is a cheap rip off. Its true.

no complaints about my ipod either.. . i tried the "wannabe empty battery" thing once.. but geez, it's not killing you ;)

ipod's are sexy and stabil .. end of story

mmm three weeks to my birthday... three weeks 'til iPod. Sek-C. :D

i hate macs

at least we're starting with a non-biased intelligent opinon :rolleyes:

chris

[QUOTE=Fig]at least we're starting with a non-biased intelligent opinon :rolleyes:

chris[/QUOTE]


LMAO!!!!! :D

All shook up
Our listening habits are being revolutionized by the iPod shuffle

By Joseph P. Kahn, Boston Globe Staff, 4/5/2004

"Just take those old records off the shelf, I sit and listen to 'em by myself," Bob Seger sings in "Old Time Rock and Roll," a staple of classic-rock radio. If today's music doesn't have the same soul, as Seger laments, it surely comes packed inside a remarkable new listening tool, one that is keeping more and more of those old records, and CDs, on a lot of shelves these days.

Most conspicuous among the tools of this burgeoning revolution is the Apple-made iPod, a compact, lightweight digital-music player with a king-size capability to store, index, and play tunes at the flick of a wheel or the tap of a button. Introduced in 2001, the iPod is not the only MP3 player on the market, but it is the most popular and versatile of the bunch, offering prodigious amounts of computing power in a highly portable container.

Its popularity has soared since the past holiday season; when the newest model, the iPod Mini, debuted in February, 100,000 preorders were already booked. This forced the company to delay a worldwide rollout planned for this month.

The iPod is also a rare crossover hit for Apple, since the company offers the iTunes software for both Mac and Windows.

Even more wondrous than its sophisticated technology, though, is how the iPods and their ilk are changing the way music is being experienced, or reexperienced, by all sorts of audiophiles in all sorts of settings, from health clubs and school cafeterias to malls and subway cars.

In essence, these devices function much like customized jukeboxs or personalized radio stations, but don't require a pocketful of coins to feed them or noisy advertisements to support them. "All my music, all the time -- and all in my pocket" might be their operating mantra.

When thousands of titles are transferred onto the machine's hard drive and in rotation, users say, what happens on the listening end can be aesthetically stimulating, even liberating. This is not necessarily because the tracks are unfamiliar, but because the software's shuffle-play capability juxtaposes them in intriguing ways, not only across an entire 5,000-track collection but within, say, a compilation of blues tunes or Broadway melodies, or even shuffling through only the tracks played in the past 90 days.

In many cases, such specialized playlists can be automatically expanded by iTunes, the companion software that is another vital component of iPod chic. Want to create a continually updated playlist of every song on your iPod that was released during your college years? The machine can be programmed to do that, too.

You can take it with you

Users can now stow away their albums and CDs as backup files while hauling their collections wherever they go. These tiny music boxes and their distinctive, earbud-style headphones have become life-transforming accessories: the keys to a musical magic kingdom where hundreds of favorite tunes, from Rachmaninov to Ricky Skaggs, can happily share space and be retrieved almost instantly. One devotee is New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross. Writing in the magazine a few weeks ago, Ross, 36, marveled at the way his machine "goes crashing through barriers of style in ways that change how I listen" when programmed to skip randomly from one track to another. His breakthrough moment, Ross says in a recent telephone interview, occurred when the shuffle mode on his iPod took him from a recording of Igor Stravinksy's "Rites of Spring" to Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues," an unexpected yet inspired musical transition that "was exactly in synch with what I'd been thinking about," he says.

"For me, it's all about the mix," says Ross, who got his iPod two years ago. "All these different types of music coexisting in ways they haven't before." With as much as 40 gigabytes of memory (equivalent to what a powerhouse desktop computer offered just a few years ago), some iPods have enough room to absorb a complete, bookcase-size collection of music -- 10,000 songs or more, stored on a device scarcely bigger than a deck of playing cards. Another hallmark is the device's ability to transfer tracks from a computer at lightning speed, thanks to FireWire, the Apple-devised standard for high-speed data transfer.

To youth-market researcher Max Valiquette, this combination of smallness and technological muscle is part of an accelerating cultural shift away from home-based entertainment toward a brave new world of portability, allowing consumers vastly greater control over what they listen to and view.

"One, you don't have to wait for what you want to hear," says Valiquette, 30, an iPod user and president of Youthography, a research firm based in Toronto. "Two, it's not the volume of songs but the navigation -- by mood, genre, popularity, artist, et cetera -- that's the real genius here."

Valiquette also notes that the ability to control one's listening habits has steadily expanded since the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, making headphones a commonplace accessory. From mix tapes to custom-made CDs, the "know-me-by-my-music" mentality of older music lovers is being taken to new heights by the iPod generation, he says.

"You don't sit around a coffee shop anymore saying, `If you dig that tune, you'll dig this, too,' " Valiquette says. "You pull out your iPod instead and say, `Hey, listen to this.' "

A new 'musical world'

J. D. Biersdorfer, a writer for The New York Times and the author of "iPod & iTunes," a user's manual for iPodlings, marks the beginning of the digital-jukebox phenomenon at roughly three years ago, when the 6-gigabyte Nomad portable music player debuted. Apple later emerged from the pack, she says, by marrying a cool, industrial-looking design with an elegant interface that was simple to use, even for the technologically challenged.

In Manhattan, Biersdorfer says, there is now a "white headphone club" made up of iPodlings who glance at one another across a crowded bus or subway car, tacitly acknowledging their private listening space. Ian Poulin, 35, of Arlington, was strolling around Lower Manhattan recently and spotted several couples using split headjacks to share a single machine. Some stopped briefly to plug into others' units, Poulin reports, "if only to experience their musical world for 30 seconds."

Even dance clubs have gotten in on the craze. A Manhattan club called Apt invites patrons to play their own iPod-generated set lists in place of DJs. The practice, known as MP3Jing, has spread to at least one London club, where friendly competitions pit one iPod playlist against another.

But the real revolution is happening at the grass-roots level with iPod owners like Ben Lazan, 16, a Worcester high-schooler. Lazan got his as a holiday gift and has already downloaded 1,700 tracks on his 15-gig machine, most "ripped" from his own or his sister's CD collections.

"I just put it in my pocket, and I have a huge variety of music without carrying maybe two or three CD cases with me to school," Lazan says. "I'm definitely listening more than I did before." His titles span a wide variety of genres -- jazz, techno, alt-rock, classic rock, R&B, funk, swing -- all available according to mood.

Singer-songwriter Meghan Toohey, another music omnivore, calls it the "ultimate mix tape" device and particularly loves her iPod when traveling or exercising. "Before hopping on an airplane, you're not going through your collection wondering which CDs you can't live without for a week," Toohey says.

The speed with which she can download favorite tracks is another boon, she adds. "You don't spend hours over a CD burner."

Unsurprisingly, Generations X and Y have gravitated toward Podland in large numbers. And baby boomers like Karen Rudnick 58, of Lexington, have joined the revolution, too.

Rudnick, director of a training-services company, bought her 20-gig iPod a year ago, primarily to use at her health club. Now she designs special playlists to play over the stereo at dinner parties, purchases single tracks for downloading from Apple's iTunes website, and stores copious amounts of music on her home computer, something she never did before. She and her husband seldom bring CDs on the road anymore. Instead, she says, "We put together a playlist of 100 songs we can live with and play it through the car stereo."

Might the mighty iPod and its clones grow to threaten radio stations? It's conceivable, although that scenario is challenged by WBCN-FM program director Oedipus, himself an iPod loyalist.

Stations like 'BCN provide a mix of songs and patter, he argues, and cull from thousands of CDs, providing a filter for listeners who cannot wade through stacks of new releases on their own. Nevertheless, Oedipus says, "Requests have fallen off dramatically over the past five years, primarily because of downloading."

Toohey, who fronts the band the So and So's, admits that as a professional musician she has other issues with the digital-music revolution, such as control over her product in the cyber-marketplace. On balance, though, the positives of capacity, variety, and portability outweigh any negatives, she says.

"The next thing, you'll be able to beam a song over from one iPod to another," Toohey says. "That would be great."

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Have any of you ADHD-addled youngin's even read this far?