MUSIC | Ahmad Humeid gets his hand on Apple’s latest iPod: the Shuffle

My first portable music device in the 1980s was a cheap Walkman-like cassette tape player. It probably cost no more than 20 US$s. I had a few plastic boxes full of tapes, most of which were copies of friends’ tapes or copies we bought from places like EMC in Shmeisani, one of the early music stores in Amman where one could find a decent collection of pop music (I wonder what happened to that place).

Then in the 90’s it was time to move to CDs. On a trip to Dubai I got myself a nice portable CD player. Thinking about it, the only advantage over tapes was that the sound quality was much better and I didn’t have to rewind and forward endlessly to get to a song. The main disadvantage was that my collection of tapes was (obviously) not playable on the CD player and it was impossible to make copies of friend’s CDs. Please remember that up until the late 1990s a blank CD used to cost around 15 US$ in Jordan, not to mention the cost of a CD burner.

The CD collection I amassed over the years has been sitting in our living room, mostly gathering dust. Work pressure and family life doesn’t leave most people with time to spend listening to music, save for Radio.

Then, thanks to MP3s my interest in music, both from the ‘old days’ and new releases has returned. Slowly, my collection of songs on my laptop started to grow. I even started converting some of my CDs into MP3s.

That’s why I was pretty excited when I finally got my hands on Apple’s new iPod Shuffle. It’s funny, but my decision to get this little jukebox was not really driven entirely by music. What I really needed was a decent USB memory stick! Why on earth do I need a portable music player anyway? I don’t jog (but I am planning to start) and as a car using Ammani I am more of a Radio addict (BBC News and a bit of Play 99.6). The iPod is really for cultures that have long subway rides and where people actually walk or run.

I might have just bought a regular USB memory stick but I said, the heck with it, I’ll pay a bit extra and get an iPod Shuffle.

The iPod has become the Walkman of the 2000’s, much to Apple’s delight and Sony’s dismay. It is such a powerful phenomena. Owners of iPods really love their little musical companions. And if you’re really into music, like my friend who has something like 4,000 songs on her iPod, think of the fun you’ll have plugging-in your entire music collection into any party’s sound system!

The iPod Shuffle is Apple’s attempt to grab a share of a market that it initially decided to ignore. Regular iPods have hard disks inside of them. That’s how they achieve a capacity of up to 60 Gigabytes. That also prices them above US$ 300. The iPod Shuffle is a cheaper ($99 for the 512 version and $150 for the 1 GB version) flash-memory based, which is a type of memory similar to a digital camera’s memory card. The cost of such memory has dropped substantially recently and it is normal to see 1 GB USB memory stick being sold at less than 100 US$ a piece.

Not having used a portable music player since the days of my old CD player, I was blown away by the realization that this little piece of white plastic actually contained the music of 20 CDs. Once I loaded it up with music from iTunes (Apple’s PC and Mac based jukebox software), it was quite something to get all this sound power from something so tiny and light.

Another great thing is that the device contains a rechargeable battery that gets charged when it is plugged into the USB port of my computer. So, no worries about replacing batteries here.

Over the past few days I’ve been taking the Shuffle everywhere, including my car. I found an old adapter cable that plugs into the iPod on one end and has a tape like converter on the other end that I put into my car’s tape player. Thank you Shuffle! You saved me from hearing too many Nelly songs on the Radio.

Now, Apple is not alone in the flash-based music player market. In fact there are over a dozen companies producing them. But you can count on Apple to be different: first, unlike almost everyone else’s players, the iPod Shuffle was designed without a screen. When it first came out some reviewers expressed their utter shock at this. Second, Apple is using its branding power to sell you randomness. Like the clever people who sell us bottled water, Apple has managed to package the ability of its player to play songs in random order (hence the ‘shuffle’ name) as a key feature!

Now before you scoff at the lack of screen and the randomness thing, consider that most people don’t ever look at the screens of their players in the first place. It’s a different story all together when you consider those who have thousands of songs and carefully sequenced play-lists on their larger iPods and who obviously need screens to browse through their collections.

I too started out sceptical about the random playback ‘feature’/ when I first got the iPod Shuffle up and running, but it really grew on me. You never know what’s coming next, so there’s a little surprise every few minutes. Of course, the iPod Shuffle can also play the 240 songs in normal order (which the user can determine using iTunes).

The lack of a screen keep the player extremely simple. But I did find myself missing a display on several occasions: when songs come up whose name I can’t remember for example. I also found some free audio books in MP3 format on the web, some of which are over 20 hours in length. It would be really useful to have screen to be able to fast forward to a certain section of the book.

Still, I am amazed at our how my music collection has shrunk from several big plastic boxes to a piece of plastic no larger than a pack of gum.

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