iPODS - What the hell are they??

[Petal]

Hi everyone,

I am hearing so much about these iPOD thingy's and I would love to cut through all the advertising hoopla and understand exactly what it is they do and what I might use one for.

I drive to work on a country road and don't have a very good car radio and am a bit in between different stations so my only option is cassette tapes.

But I was wondering if an iPOD could be of any use in this situation or can it only be plugged into my ear for me to hear it??

My take on it is that you can pay about $1.00 or so to download a song onto it and you have room for heaps and heaps of songs (if you can afford it!!) to fill up you iPOD and then you can play them to your hearts content.

I went on to a site (can remember which one now) and the music was not really what I was looking for as it was too modern. My taste is for easy listening type stuff from the last 30 years or so. eg a bit of Lionel Ritchie, Barbra Streisand, Gloria Estefan, Boz Scaggs, etc

Does anyone out there know much about iPOD's???

Thanks
Petal

 

[Ol School Skata]

I have an ipod mini which is the intermediate version - 18 months old now.

basically it is a small gadget - bout the size of a business card (for a mini anyway and about 10mm thick) which allows you to copy all or most of your CD's onto, into a file format known as MP3. My mini holds about 4 Gigabytes - i have put about 60 CD's on it now and there is still room to add more. Can hold up to 1000 songs. Comes with software to install on your computer allows you to keep a library of songs.

As standard it comes with ear pieces, but you can buy accessories for it so you can plug it into your car stereo, buy its own speakers and docking station. So if driving in the car - no need to take out a CD from the player, insert another, put back into the case for CD wallet holder.

ipod is a brand made by Apple. There are other MP3 players made by other manufacturers - all the big electronics companies, but ipods are by far the most popular brand.

you can get onto any number of sites and download your choice of music - just need to search for them.

Basically these MP3 players (like ipods) make CD's out of date as all music is held electronically.

The proper ipod's now have there own screen so you can now watch DVD's as well and hold so much more than my 'mini'.

 

[Petal]

Wow thanks OSS that is amazing. When you copy your Cd's onto your iPOD do you do it from your computer or from the CD player itself???

 

[Ol School Skata]

From the computer - load the software onto your PC, then you can copy your CD's into the program, which then updates your ipod when you connect it to the computer. Some of the larger ipods allow thousands of songs to be stored which just blows my mind!!

You can even use the ipod as an external hard drive if you want to transport some other computer documents.

 

[Ruby]

My son has one of these when he's using his ipod in his car http://www.gadgetlounge.net/archives/2006/01/03/itrip-lcd-review/

He loves it.

 

[Mr. Fabulous]

iPod (in my opinion) stands for 'i'm a Piece of dogs**t'. I don't know how many people I know who have had issues with their iPods. Extremely poorly built. If you want something like an iPod, get something from Creative. Also, I've heard iRiver have a few good models as well.

Mark

 

[Merovingian]

iPod (in my opinion) stands for 'i'm a Piece of dogs**t'. I don't know how many people I know who have had issues with their iPods. Extremely poorly built. If you want something like an iPod, get something from Creative. Also, I've heard iRiver have a few good models as well.

I own two and have never had a problem. Although my Dad's older one died, (probably because it was handled somewhat roughly and was left in a glove box on a hot day).

 

[Ajax]

My brother bought me an Ipod shuffle for Xmas. It's still in the green coloured box. He thought I'd be excited. I'm just not too sure how to use it.


Ajax

 

[Petal]

Well I am certainly interested in looking more into it. Especially love the idea of the itrip, god technology amazes me!!

 

[Glebe]

iPod (in my opinion) stands for 'i'm a Piece of dogs**t'. I don't know how many people I know who have had issues with their iPods. Extremely poorly built. If you want something like an iPod, get something from Creative. Also, I've heard iRiver have a few good models as well.

Mark

Hi Mark can you back that up with stats? A JBHifi employee I know tells me that they sell 10 times as many Ipods as they do I-River H320's etc, yet they get 10 times as many I-River's back faulty. I believe there are no issues with the build quality of Ipods. You do hear of people having issues but you have to put this into the context of the millions being sold. There were issues once with the batteries but this was in the generation 1/2 days.

 

[Glebe]

Well I am certainly interested in looking more into it. Especially love the idea of the itrip, god technology amazes me!!

Hi Petal,

If you have many of your albums on cd, they are already in a digital file format, you won't need to buy these songs again. It just happens that this format is very 'fatty' and it's very easy to convert it to mp3 which is very thin. A normal album is about 650mb, when you convert it to mp3 it shrinks it to 65mb or so. Basically about 5mb a song. So if you have a 5 gig (5000mb) ipod for example you can store about 1000 songs or 100 albums. Amazing huh? Not bad for a few hundred bucks.

Other Ipod-like devices do many other things but you can't beat the ipod for simplicity.

 

[geoffw]

We bought our daughter an ipod shuffle. It failed in the first week. It cost us $$ to get looked at- and they told us we had to pay this regardless. We paid it, had it fixed, and it failed again in 3 weeks.

$200 down the loo.

 

[redwing]

Some friends picked up some MP4's whilst over in China for an EXPO and we got one very cheap... It's great, we've stored the babys photo's, music and video clips on it..

I believe they are avialable on e-bay now as well..

had no dramas so far other than getting a plug to convert from the asian power point style to ours

 

[Ol School Skata]

We bought our daughter an ipod shuffle. It failed in the first week. It cost us $$ to get looked at- and they told us we had to pay this regardless. We paid it, had it fixed, and it failed again in 3 weeks.

$200 down the loo.

So you could say, "..she wasn't apples mate"

OSS

 

[kaf]

My brother bought me an Ipod shuffle for Xmas. It's still in the green coloured box. He thought I'd be excited. I'm just not too sure how to use it.


Ajax

Hi Ajax


Just open it up and play with it - really simple to use and the instructions tell you everything you need to know. If you don't have itunes on your computer you can just download it of the net I think and then you are ready to turn your music into ipod format. By the way we've not had any problem with our ipod and none of our friends ever had problems with theirs.

We usually buy music from itunes store but my brothers told me about allofmp3.com - apparently a site that lives in Russia and uses the slightly more relaxed copyright laws there . It's ca 10c a song to download and appears to be legal (I've not checked on that though). Has anyone tried that one yet?

Cheers

kaf

 

[MarkB]

iPODS - What the hell are they??

Superfluous consumerism exemplified.

Mark

 

[Puppeteer]

We bought our daughter an ipod shuffle. It failed in the first week. It cost us $$ to get looked at- and they told us we had to pay this regardless. We paid it, had it fixed, and it failed again in 3 weeks.

$200 down the loo.

That doesn't sound right. Did you get a warranty repair via the apple website, or though the store you bought it from?

Apple handle all their repairs via the web. You only have to pay an amount if they can't find a problem with them, if they are under warranty. Apple pay postage, packing and everything.

 

[emalily]

I have an Ipod Mini which is probably the worst $300 I've ever spent. The battery Apple uses is absolutely useless - mine flattens itself within 24 hours when charged to full. Usually if I have the charger handy a few seconds will revive it to nearly full but that's not much use unless you're at home. Apple don't want to know about it because I made the fatal mistake of telling them about how it revives if you have the charger handy, which has turned me off buying an Apple laptop. They do however tell me for ~ $200 they can replace the battery with a new one.

All up I've probably used it 20 - 30 times over the last year because it is usually flat.

For music, I just loaded a lot of my CD's onto my Ipod which is apparently soon to be legal under Australian law. I find ITunes pretty cumbersome and a single CD takes ~ 8 minutes to load on my not very old laptop.

My sisters have the new 30g video Ipods which they are quite happy with, however they are still fairly expensive and scratch very easily.

 

[Jindaro]

We usually buy music from itunes store but my brothers told me about allofmp3.com - apparently a site that lives in Russia and uses the slightly more relaxed copyright laws there . It's ca 10c a song to download and appears to be legal (I've not checked on that though). Has anyone tried that one yet?

I have a 20GB iPod and have owned it for about a year and love it and have never had one single problem with it. Mind you, it goes from my bag to the charger to my desk so no rough stuff with it.

The battery seems to last for 5 days and I play it for between 2-4 hrs a day at work.

As for www.allofmp3.com, I have used this site and it's fabulous. I did some heavy research first and came across an article on smh.com.au and they gave it nothing but good reviews. My biggest concern was a russian site having my credit card details but so far (3 months), no problems.

 

[Glebe]

Allofmp3.com have had my credit card details for about 18 months now, no problems. I recommend them if you want to pay for music...