My wife was recently promoted to department lead at the Barnes & Noble where she works. To congratulate her, I bought her a 512MB iPod Shuffle and $25 gift certificate to the iTunes Music Store. Just wanted to share my first thought about the Shuffle.
First of all, it's small... very small... almost TOO small. I have a sneaking suspicion that the lanyard will stay attached, if for no other reason than to make the thing easier to find on a messy desk. It's very light, and very easy to use. I plugged it into my computer to charge it and copy over some songs. When I selected the Shuffle from my playlist in iTunes, a Shuffle button appeared at the bottom of my window. This allows you to randomly add tracks from any playlist or your entire library. If you're like me, I don't recommend the "Library" option... nothing kills a good workout routine faster than "Killing me softly" or an audiobook chapter. Moving songs to the shuffle is a little slow, but it's about what I expected for USB. Once the songs were copied, I ejected the drive and popped in the headphones. I don't know what I was expecting when I started listening... maybe the hollow plastic sound that comes from cheap electronics and micro-speakers. Maybe a crackling or popping like a radio that's almost in range, but not quite. All I heard was music... as clear, and maybe moreso, than my 40GB iPod. The quality of music was excellent. Controlling the iPod Shuffle was easy too. It has five buttons on the front that control all song management. The up and down buttons control volume, the center button controls play and pause, and the right and left buttons serve a dual purpose, playing previous or next tracks, or by holding them down, scanning forward or backwards within a track. Changing tracks is faster on the Shuffle than on my iPod, as it's faster to load songs from flash than search for them on a hard drive. On the back is a three-position slide switch. Position one, all the way up, is off. Position two, center position, will play all tracks in the order in which they were imported. Position three, the bottom position, is shuffle, and plays all tracks in random order. Below the slider switch is a small button to show battery life. Green is good, orange needs to be charged and no light means the battery is dead. So far, my only complaint is a lack of a method to store the cap of the Shuffle when it's being charged. The cap fell off the desk last night and bounced under the table. We didn't realize it and it took a good 15 minutes of searching to find it... it had been out of the package for less than a half hour and I was already losing parts! We found it though, but we know now that we need a better means of storing it while the iPod is syncing/charging. Overall, it's a great little device. If you know someone who has been wanting an iPod, but isn't sure they would really use it, at $99 for the 512MB this is a good first step. They can see if they really like the iPod, start building their playlists in iTunes and eventually, if they like it, they can get a larger iPod to hold more of their music. Hmm... wonder if they should rename it i-Crack? -- Bryan C. Forrest Macintosh Specialist & Asst. Network Administrator LifeNet http://www.lifenet.org | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
