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You'll be astonished at the size.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
An iPod so small you could swallow it by mistake, so cool you'll wear it everywhere


April 10, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   When Sony introduced the Walkman in 1979, I bought the very first model -- the TPS-L2 -- and gave it to my 10-year-old daughter. I was amazed at how small it was, about the size of a paperback novel.
   A few weeks ago, I treated myself to my own portable player, this time from Apple, not Sony. I bought an iPod shuffle, which, as you might imagine, given the 26-year lead it has on Sony's first Walkman, sounds much better than that Walkman and plays a lot longer on much smaller batteries.
   But that's not what you'll notice the first time you see an iPod shuffle. You'll surely be astonished at the size.
   For the first time, you can buy a high fidelity music player so small that the phrase "pocket size" is useless in describing it. To understand how tiny this player is, I suggest you think of it this way: The new iPod shuffle from Apple is so small you could swallow it by mistake.
   It's barely there. It weighs almost nothing -- no more than the key you use to start your car. It's white, the trademark color for a lot of Apple's cool products, but the size and shape could make the Wrigley folks think it's a pack of gum that fell into a glass of milk.
   Surprisingly, my tests of the new shuffle show a surprising sophistication. Perhaps most interesting is the shuffle's audio quality. Apple's design makes use of a new audio circuit that cuts distortion and raises sound output levels at the same time.
   The difference between the shuffle's audio quality and the sound of other players, including previous iPods, is unmistakable.
   As a longtime fan of pipe organs, I have dozens of recordings that capture the rumble of the lowest octave of powerful pipe organs, and when I transferred some of those recordings to the shuffle, the lowest pedal tones -- some as low as 16 Hz, at the very bottom edge of human hearing -- were clearly audible when I used my studio reference headphones.
   My recordings of Spanish music from the pre-Renaissance era sounded as crisp as they do on my home system, and, perhaps best of all for this fan of good old rock and roll, my recordings of The Who came alive with an authority that seems impossible to believe from such a tiny player.
   The shuffle got its name from the automatic shuffle mode that can be turned on at any time. The little player can go through all your songs in their regular order, so that you can listen to entire albums, song by song, or it can play all your music in random order. I found shuffle play delightful for most of my rock and jazz music, but I had to turn it off for all my classical selections. (Hearing the second movement of a Beethoven quartet after the third aria in "Tosca" just doesn't seem natural.)
   The iPod shuffle is the first iPod that uses solid-state memory instead of a tiny hard drive for music storage. I bought the 1-gigabyte model for $141 from Amazon.com. (The list price is $149.) A model with half the capacity, 512 megabytes, lists for $99. The price includes Apple's famous white ear buds. They sound gorgeous but tendeded to fall out as soon as I moved my head, so I switched to RCA headphones that clipped over my ears.
   The 1-gigabyte model stores the equivalent of about 20 CDs of music. Like all other iPods, it can store normal files, too. It works with both Windows PCs and Macintoshes. It won't work with early versions of Windows. You have to be using Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
   In addition to its phenomenal sound quality, the shuffle excels in two other ways -- its battery life and the ease with which you can connect the shuffle to your computer.
   Apple says the shuffle can play for 12 hours before needing a recharge, but I got as much as 17 hours. Playing music for an hour or two and then turning the player off probably prolongs the playing time. Recharging could not be simpler: You just snap off a white cap on the bottom of the shuffle and plug it into a USB port. Apple says the shuffle works best plugged into a USB 2 port, but I used a standard USB connection (called USB 1.1) without a problem.
   Plugging in the shuffle automatically launches Apple's iPod software, called iTunes, on a Windows PC or Macintosh. The iPod shows up as a device in the software, and all you have to do is drag songs or playlists to the shuffle. You can choose to have iTunes synchronize all your music or just selected playlists automatically every time you plug the shuffle into a USB port. (I turned that function off as soon as I saw it in action. I have about 15 gigabytes of music, far too much to transfer to my shuffle. I'd guess that most iTunes users also have far more audio tracks than the shuffle can hold.)
   The only drawback of the shuffle -- and I consider this a minor deficiency -- is the lack of a screen. You can't get a list of songs and can't find out what's playing. I found this a little annoying when playing classical music, but I have no trouble identifying all the rock and jazz tunes on my shuffle. Switching to the next or previous selection is easy; you simply click on the "+" or "-" marks on a white wheel. Pressing the Play button while the shuffle is running puts it into pause. Pulling out the headphone plug does the same thing.
   I usually carry my shuffle in my shirt pocket, but I looped it around my neck, using the white lanyard that comes with the unit, whenever I wanted to look cool. Kids who know what "cool" looks like waved when they saw me. Perhaps more important to Apple's marketing, adults who don't yet know about cool iPods often stopped me to ask what that little "soap on a rope" was. I think I sold a dozen iPods for Apple the first week I wore it.