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The Digital Music Revolution

A review of the Apple iPod

If like me you have been watching the recent test series between England and South Africa, the sight of the players sitting on their respective balconies with their earphones stuck firmly in their ears listening to music will have become very familiar. The music player of choice for many of the players is of course the Apple iPod.

There are now four types of iPods available, the brand new Shuffle, the iPod mini, the iPod and the iPod photo.

Brand new to the market is the iPod shuffle that weighs as little as a car key and provides up to 240 tracks of skip-free music and with up to 12 hours of continuous playback time, it keeps going as long as you do.

Next up is the iPod mini that weighs in at just 103 g (3.6 ounces) and is smaller than most mobile phones. iPod mini features an anodised aluminium case and come in a choice of five trend-setting colours: silver, gold, green, pink or blue. The iPod mini lasts up to 8 hours on a single battery charge and gives you up to 25 minutes of skip protection for up to 1000 songs.

The new fourth-generation iPod features the fabulous Apple Click Wheel first introduced on iPod mini, iPod offers up to 12 hours of battery life, weighs 158 g (5.6 ounces) and stores up to 10,000 songs in your pocket and with growing range of new accesories allows you enjoy them wherever you go, including In the car.

Top of the range is the iPod photo that despite being no bigger than a pack of playing cards and weighing in at just 181 g (6.4 ounces), allows you to carry not only an entire library of your favourite music of up to 15,000 songs but as many as 25,000 photos with a razor-sharp LCD display that lets you see your photos in 65,000 vivid colours, and with built-in backlighting, you can show them off indoors or out.

All iPods come with the splendid iTunes software that lets you build and manage your digital music collection on both Mac and Windows PC platforms and makes it easy to quickly transfer your favourite songs and albums. Just put a CD into your Mac or PC and click the iTunes Import button and you can import music in a variety of formats, such as MP3 or AAC, and at whatever quality level you’d prefer. You can even choose the new Apple Lossless encoder that according to Apple offers sound quality indistinguishable from the original CDs at about half the file size of the original. With FireWire and USB 2.0 support, you can transfer the music from an entire CD to your iPod in just 5 seconds or less.

Sony have now entered the market with their new range of Walkman MP3 players, aggresively priced to compete. For me, the iPod is still the number one player of choice, with its beautiful and simple styling and of course the instantly recognisable white ear buds!

The "must have" gadget for 2005!!

© Chris Banting
2005