For years now I have been a resistor of the Cult of iPod. Everyone I know has an iPod – most of them have large capacity iPod Classics. I bought an iriver H340 nearly 5 years ago. I struggled with it at first because it has an awful user interface. Then along came Rockbox, an Open Source firmware which can run on the iriver (and on some ipods too) which gives much more flexibility to using an mp3 player. It made the machine fly – and I really enjoyed using the machine for listening to music, running playlists, listening to podcasts, and recording short memos when I was travelling and had ideas.
Well, I ran out of capacity on the 40GB machine some time ago, and hunted for a replacement. After a long time hesitating, I decided to jump in the Apple pool and an iPod Classic 160GB came my way for Christmas.
Am I enjoying it? Yes, I am. I still don’t have all of my CD collection on there yet – but it’s doing all the things I wanted. A relatively new feature, Genius playlists, is particularly brilliant for mixing a playlist based on the track currently playing. It also has Genius Mixes which puts together streams of tracks based on a particular theme – which is determined by the content of the player.
I was a reluctant user of iTunes, but it works well even if it is a bit slow (probably because my laptop is ancient!) It handles podcasts beautifully. And the iPod’s handling of video is fantastic.
I was also really pleased to see that I can also record on the iPod. I bought a little plug in microphone on Amazon for just £4 and it opens up software which is already on the machine. I can record memos on the go and then listen to them back. I’ve also used this feature to record ambient sounds when out walking.
As I write this I am listening to a Podcast from WFMU called Downtown Soulville (obscure soul 45s). All in all I am impressed.