Man those snobbery charges dropped in real quick. While people don't use all their iPods, I think they use far more then one tape or one cd worth, so there is real value in the storage. I used to carry 3 or 4 tapes and then about a dozen cds, a bulky and annoying process. Of course now my iPod is broken and I carry nothing ;)

The second non snobbish reason for the storage is all about potential. While people might not listen to the stored stuff very much, there is value in the potentiality. Its an amazing feeling when some old obscure favorite of your's comes up in a conversation and you realize that its on your player and you can listen right now.

You can look at it in terms of personal computers too. How much of that harddrive are you really using frequently? Probably only a few gigs for the OS, a couple key programs and the current documents. But its great to have access to all the other programs and old documents for those rare times you find the need.

Okay, no. While I don't feel the general iPod hatred in general, that accessory is just pretentious and lame.

Oops. I really didn't mean to use the word "general" so many times.

June: no, no, no. You see, the retropod is PRETENDING to be pretentious and lame, which makes it non-pretentious and un-lame. You see? It's all about that Gen-X snake-eating-its-tail circular culture of irony which eventually leads to madness. Madness and nostalgia for things that haven't even happened yet.

Recursive Schrodinger lame/not lame states aside, however, it makes a pretty good beach case for your $350.00 one-CD-delivery system.

Hee. John, I always thought that Gen-X (of which I am a member) was never more neatly summed up than in the episode of The Simpsons where Homer joins the "Hullabalooza" tour.

Bored teenager #1: Oh, here comes that fat guy who gets shot with cannonballs. *He's* cool.

Bored teenager #2: Are you being sarcastic?

Bored teenager #1: Dude...I don't even know anymore.

I guess I'm one of the people whose listening patterns suit the iPod, then. When I had a walkman, I would regularly carry 5-10 tapes around with me - while I might only listen to one or two on a given day, I couldn't predict in advance what mood I would be in, and thus what music I would want to listen to. When I got a CD player capable of playing burned CDs full of MP3, I would carry 4 or 5 MP3 CDs, plus a bunch of normal CDs with me, and pick what I wanted to listen to based on my mood.
I don't have an iPod or equivalent yet, but I'm sure I will make full use of the storage capablity when I do.

June, I love that bit! I almost always laugh during The Simpsons, but I was on the floor with tears in my eyes the first time I saw that one. Wowza.

Anyway, back on topic. *g*

I love my Neuros (http://www.neurosaudio.com) not for the "cool and hip" factor (it has none, being less pretty and more bulky than almost anything else of its kind on the market), but because I can be strolling down the street on my way to or from the bus/light-rail stop, get a whim to hear some album I haven't listened to in ages, and satisfy that whim in mere seconds. That, and it plays Ogg Vorbis files. Heh.

Mind you, the fact that I can build as many weird custom playlists as I want doesn't hurt, either. (Hello, three hours of anime theme songs! *cough*)

Maybe I'm an abnormal user of such devices, though. Hmm.

Clive, as an iPod owner for just a little over a year, I have to say that I now agree with you. I bought my 30-gig iPod last April, and thought I had just done the best thing ever for my music collection. Yes, I have almost 30 gigs of music, but as you (and a bunch of researchers) point out, I only really listen to the same three albums or playlists most of the time.

In retrospect, I'd almost say that a 256-MB RCA Lyra would do just fine for the time I spend listening to my iPod anyway. I only really use it on a plane or at the gym. And the lyra even has an fm tuner. The only pain in the butt would be having to load up a new playlist before leaving the house if you decide it's time for a change.

Sure, my iPod also doubles as a hard drive, it has a calendar, contacts, notes, etc. But ask me how many times I've actually used any of those features. NEVER.

As an iPod user, let me take this opportunity to tell anyone who is looking to buy a portable mp3 player, to look at cheaper alternatives that hold a fraction of what the smallest iPod holds. That is, unless they WANT to take their entire music collection with them wherever they go, because they're packrats like that.

It's one of the most expensive mistakes I've ever made.

That is all.

Just to chime in as one of the people who actually uses the capacity - I

* usually run shuffle across about 10G of music
* on a whim, played through whole collection in alphabetical order by title - well, I'm only up to "When It Rains it Snows", so I'm not actually done quite yet :-)
* have a number of mood-oriented playlists, none of which are less than 4 hours
* used the extra disk space to hold digital photos while travelling

If they double the capacity of the mini, it will tempt me, because that would be about enough space for my collection. But as it is, I certainly have no reason *not* to carry all of my music, and "planning ahead" is something one does for things that matter - not a part of compensating for primitive tools...

Bought a 40gb iPod recently. Felt stupid about it. After overcoming the initial embarassment of actually using it in public (thanks to a set of new headphones) I've dumped about 30gb of tunes on it-- not only am I plugged in constantly, I've got my whole collection on shuffle. It's like my own radio station. Love it. Never had a Walkman, so I can't compare it to the "old days."

I'd like to see someone make a classic Game Boy into a case for an iPod...

This is a tres cool conversation. To clarify, I certainly don't think an Ipod has no utilitarian value at all; indeed, if you actually wanted to randomly sample a large corpus of music, it's perfect! Or if you just wanted to have a large bunch of albums around just on the offchanced you might want to listen to 'em, same thing.

I'm more intrigued by the fact a very small percentage of Ipod owners will fess up to having bought it purely for fashion, when it's pretty clear that a significant chunk of people have bought it for precisely that reason. There's something about it that makes people uncomfortable about citing "fashion" as the reason they bought it, when they'd clearly have no problem citing fashion as the reason for a bunch of other purchases: Nikes, a particular type of car, etc. (I buy tons of things purely for reasons of fashion, including suits, which I have a big weakness for.)

June:

Don't forget, Bored Teenager #2 bursts into tears after that. At least, I *remember* it that way.

Oh, and Tony: I *did* try to make an iPod case out of a GB classic, but it (believe it or not!) wasn't really big enough. Go figure! It would probably make a r-e-e-e-e-aly sarcastic lunchbox though.

Here is another positive point of portable mp3 players (I have an Archos 20 Gb since two or three years, way before the iPod appeared on the market - by the way, it's funny how "iPod" is becoming a sort of generic name for "portable mp3 player").

I had a small collection (by today standart) of around 500 CDs in my country. When I moved to the US, there was no way I could carry them all (it would have been like 2 full luggages just for that). After buying my Archos, during one vacation back home, I transferred my whole collection into the Archos hard drive. My CDs are still in France, but their music is with me in the US.

So these gizmos can actually be useful :)

--
Guillermito.

It's only online in discussion like this that I ever see anybody relating regret at buying an iPod, or admitting that they don't use it to anywhere near it's full potential (ie. listening to only a few tracks on repeat).

Both I and my girlfriend are iPod owners, as are half of my work colleagues and probbaly around a third of my close friends. All of these people feel much the same as me - that the iPod is the single best thing to ever happen to their music collections and listening habits.

It's strange that a simple piece of technology can change something as fundamental as the way you perceive music, but that's how most people I know with iPods feel.

I've gone from being one of those people who worries for twenty minutes about what tapes/CDs/minidiscs to take with them when walking out of the door to being one of those people with an iPod, who carries a huge selection at all times and just presses the shuffle button. Talking with other iPod owning friends about this, they all feel the same.

Maybe that's just saying something about my social circle though - we're all music geeks.

As an aside - the iPod is a godsend for rock club DJs like me. Never again will somebody make a request to be met with "sorry, I left that record at home tonight".

FWIW, I hardly ever used my music library before I got my iPod. It completely revitalized my interest in music. I can remember purchasing 1 CD in the 5 years before I got the iPod (and that was a replacement for a lost CD -- Earth and Sun and Moon by Midnight Oil).

I think one of the things missing from iPod that would increase its ability to change the way we use our music libraries is open software development. I don't even know, is there an SDK for iPod? The potential seems huge to me.

Here's an application I want for my iPod. You know how you can create playlists? I never do. Don't have the patience. So, I always leave my iPod on shuffle. But, often I don't want to hear a particular album or style of music, so I spend a lot of time pressing skip.

It occurs to me, why couldn't you write a "smart shuffle" program that would detect user preferences and build a JIT playlist using a Bayesian algorithm. The principle is simple: if the user skips a song before the first, say, 10 seconds have played, then reduce the filter preference for that kind of music. There's got to be enough data in the ID3 tags to support this.

So the reason that iPod could have a leg up on the other players is future software compatibility.

smartplaylists.com has quite a lot of stuff of that nature posted up on it.

I find the built-in 'Most Played' playlist does the job you're describing pretty well. Because songs are only tagged as 'played' if you play them through to the end, asking your iPod which songs you've played most or which you've played recently is usually a pretty good way of getting to a 'favourites' playlist. And of course you can use the Shuffle function on those playlists.

On the main topic of your comment...

Most stories of new applications created to run on the iPod are April Fools... like the one here, on the iPodHacks site.

...there are possibilities though. There's a group of people involved in a project to port the Linux operating system to iPods, and they're getting pretty far. The idea is that if they acheive their goal, the iPod will basically be a small computer, open to use in any way you like.

Clive, re: the final sentence of para. 1:

"You can enjoy all the 10,000-song pleasures of a digital-age media player, while rocking a soi-distant vibe of early-80s steampunk chic. "

I don't know if that is the coolest or the nerdiest sentence I have ever read. "Rocking" used in the rap-speak manner. "Soi-disant" a belles-lettristic snarky put-down not out of place in a Harper's magazine put-down from the mid-1940's. "Distant vibe" is pure Clive-sprach. "Early-80's" evokes the self-mocking over-particularity characteristic of much of the best rock criticism. And "steampunk" bespeaks a sensibility that has been immersed in comic books, sci-fi, and on-line role-playing games.

You are a palimpsest for turn-of-the-millenium hipster-doofus discourse.

Long may you reign!

okay, you were probably expecting this, but i do use my ipod to the extreme. (don't you remember those huge bags filled with cd cases that i used to tote back and forth from long island in the old days?) i a, run out of room and have to cycle albums, particularly when i'm reviewing more than one at a time, in and out; b, put my whole library (including all the excellent tracks i find on mp3 blogs) on shuffle more often than not; and c, get seized with the urge to listen to different things on a whim, on the subway, etc etc.

but to agree with your point -- i was in an mp3 focus group recently, and i was really shocked at the number of people who used their mp3 players exactly the way you describe -- to listen to the same songs, in the same order, over and over. of course, a lot of those people had players with capacities of less than a gig.

" As researchers have found, they just listen to the same album or playlist over and over and over again...."

...and on day 3, the wild unwashed iPod masses discovered the Shuffle setting, and the world was good again. :)

Actually, I'm not really surprised that people are still in their old listening habits with the iPod. After all, we've spent the last 100 odd years having to change discs, or tapes or whatever to listen to a new album, and we've gotten used having only a limited selection of music at a time. Not to mention I find I am happier just listening to my music and not having to spend half an hour deciding what to listen to.

In any case, the iPod is most precious when you do get sick of the same songs over and over, and you want a new set of songs, and you have at your disposal *all* your music, that's priceless.

What I'd like to see is a special hardware button devoted to turning shuffle on and off. I really hate how Apple buried the shuffle setting in the settings folder with no easy access to it when playing a song (really annoying having to press the menu button continually until I get back the main menu, then navigate to settings, then navigate to shuffle).

Uhm... whoops, forgot to put my name on the previous comment....

i have discovered the shuffle option on my ipod but i don't really see the problem with listening to the same album for three weeks in a row either. isn't that what we ALL used to do back in the day when we were broke ass idiots and could only buy (yes i still recall the days of purchasing music in the form of an actual item) one album a month (or less, or more). you always listen to your new stuff more and then after a while it gets a bit boring and you either get MORE new stuff (yeey capitalism) or you listen to old stuff again.

i got the ipod purely because i HATE dragging a discman or walkman. a discman won't fit into your pocket (i'm a girl, apparently we don't need pockets anyway) and tapes are a nightmare because you can't dump that much music on it. so if you like variety and travel a whole damn lot as i do (and have a lot of back problems) the ipod (or equavalant) is ideal. sure it costs a lot of money and i DO have a hard time deciding what song or i'm supposed to listen to now, but at least now it's ALL THERE with me and i the likeliness of me getting fed up with my entire music collection is a lot more unlikely then with the couple of (mp3) CD's or tapes i brought with me in the past.

over here in holland all people think you're an idiot of you buy an ipod anyway (WHAT? WHY? HOW MUCH? WHAT FOR?). so if you moved here you'd fit right in. it might be snobbery in the US but over here the ipod is only for the absolute übergeek (an apple fan, which i am not) and i doubt things will change once the hideous mini is released because the dutch are cheap. by the way, the mb sticks are popular here too.