My impulse buy of the month: an iPod Shuffle.
I was a the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue the other day talking with one of their “geniuses” about the fact that the case on my iBook is a little loose in one corner (they fixed the problem, sorta) and one of the salesmen told me they’d just received a shipment of iPod Shuffles. I had been thinking it would be nice to have a music player with me when I work out, but my 15 GB iPod was too bulky (plus I was worried about it’s getting smashed) so it didn’t take much convincing for me to grab a 1GB Shuffle.
So far, I’m impressed. I was very skeptical about an MP3 player that had no display and chose music for you, but I realized that (a) a display isn’t important when I’m doing something that prevents me from looking at it; and (b) I can still decide on my own what to play.
I won’t go into a detailed review of the Shuffle– there are a bunch of them out there already— but I will share a couple thoughts.
Getting music on the Shuffle is really easy. iTunes recognizes it right away and you can populate it three ways: (1) click and drag songs to it; (2) create a playlist and drag that to it; or (3) choose the “Autofill” option and iTunes will “randomly” pick songs to download to your Shuffle (more about “random” on the next page). This third option is only available when the Shuffle is plugged in; it does not appear in iTunes when a regular iPod is connected.
Playing music is in two modes: straight through or shuffle. If you load a playlist, the Shuffle will play the tunes in the order in which you loaded them; if you choose “shuffle” it mixes them up.
The sound quality rivals my 15 GB iPod. There is no equalizer option on the Shuffle, but the default setting is very nice. I intend on using my Sony earbuds with this unit instead of the mediocre iPod ‘phones that come with it.
Last night I brought it to the club with me and it worked great. I just stuck the thing in my pocket and went about my workout. I never worried about crushing or otherwise damaging it.
I would recommend this unit to anyone who wants a very simple, straightforward music player without a lot of complicated features. The fact that it doubles as a USB flash drive just makes it that much more attractive.
If you want to see what the Shuffle’s innards look like, check this out.

“Random?”
Now for a word about iPods and the concept of “random.” Ever since I got my 15 GB iPod last year, I realized that Random is not truly “random.” I have almost 2000 songs in my library and when I hit “shuffle” on my 15 GB iPod I will hear different tracks, but it’s very likely that I will hear two or three tracks from the same album in a single Shuffle session. “Shuffle” means you won’t hear the same song twice. The repetition by album must have to do with Apple’s “shuffle” algorithm.
A few months ago, Newsweek published a horribly gushing cover story about iPods, and one of the authors referred to the iPod’s “shuffling your library with the expertise of a Las Vegas blackjack dealer.” Given my experience at both Las Vegas blackjack and the iPod “shuffle” feature, I can only hope to find a table that has the kind of consistency found in the shuffle feature: I would be a very wealthy man.
I decided to put the latest version of iTunes (4.7.1) and its “Autofill” randomizer option to work. I did this four or five times with very similar results. The last time I did this, Autofill picked 174 “random” songs out of almost 2000 tracks, including:
– five songs from Elton John’s Here and There;
– four songs from the Lost in Translation soundtrack;
– three songs from Pink Floyd’s Echoes;
– two songs from XTC’s Drums and Wires – in fact, the only two songs from that album that are in my library;
– two songs from George Harrison’s All Those Years Ago boxed set;
– two songs from REM’s Around The Sun;
– two songs from a collection called Chill Brazil;
– two songs from Jennifer Warnes Famous Blue Raincoat;
– two songs from Yes’ Fragile;
– two songs from Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man;
…and in the interest of saving you, the reader, from boredom…
– four songs each from five more albums;
– three songs each from 9 more albums
– two songs each from 7 more albums.
“Random?” You be the judge.
It’s been proven that a computer can’t truly produce anything “random” because it has to work from a finite starting point. And as Lisa and I were discussing the other day, perhaps we as humans can’t truly perceive the concept of “random.”
At least I got this off my chest. It’s been bugging me for a while.