The most boring iPod post ever

You know, before I bought my iPod mini, I agonized over which color I wanted. By the time I got into a position to order, I had it narrowed down to silver, green, or blue, but I still could not decide. So I asked Rob, and he said blue. So blue it was.

She arrived a month later, it was love at first sight, and I named her Minnie because I'm unimaginative like that. At that time, she was the only mini I had ever seen besides the pink one on display at the apple store. (At the time, I hadn't yet developed my obsession with all things pink.) In the past few months, I have seen all three of the colors I was considering, and I have to say...blue was the right choice.

Green isn't nearly as pretty in person (and seems to clash with just about everything), and Rob's silver one (whom I now think of as Mickey, though I never call it that out loud--I don't think Rob's going to name it) is not as cute as Minnie either. It looks sort of institutional...like a stainless steel table. Safe, functional, but maybe a tad boring. Mickey does have the scratchlessness going for it, though, since it hasn't been dropped a hundred times like Minnie has.

So anyway, glad I went with the blue. She has a cheery way about her, yet is subdued enough to coordinate well with all my workout clothes. Yay!

Though, if Apple ever made a red or purple iPod, I'd totally cheat on her.

Ok please explain it to me like I'm an 8 year old.

How does this ipod thing work? Where do you get the music? How does it fit in there? Can you pgm it to play songs in the order you want? For any length you want? Say I want a 60 min tape to run by w/slow music for the warm up and cool down, can I just set it to play 70 mins of music and it will stop @ that point?

Um...let's see what else ;)

Naw, that 'bout covers it. For now :p

okay, but I'm not terribly good at explaining things, so I may confuse you further. I'll try to just answer your questions in order. And you may have to be a really smart 8-year-old. :)

How does the ipod work? Where do you get the music? It's essentially a hard drive-based mp3/aac/wav music player, though it does have some extra features (organizer, games) that I never use. The controls--play, pause, track navigation, volume, etc--are all on the clickwheel, which takes a little bit of getting used to, but becomes second nature.

You get music onto it by attaching it to your computer via USB or firewire cable (provided with the iPod), using iTunes.

I can't really effectively explain this without talking about iTunes. Do you use iTunes? If you don't, you should run out and download it right now (which is what I tell everyone I know, regardless of ipod ownership--if the ipod is my true love, iTunes is the mutual friend that introduced us. I loved it first). If you already use it, the next paragraph will make you go "duh".

The application is super easy to use, and you can import your CDs into the iTunes library (insert CD, click Import button on the upper right) and/or buy songs or whole albums from the iTunes music store. OR, anytime you play a supported music file (mp3, m4p, m4a, wav) using iTunes, it adds that file to the library as well. This is handy if you download mp3 files from blogs, or whatever.

It stores the music files on your computer's hard drive, and creates a library for them. From there, you can create playlists however you choose (click + button on the bottom left, name playlist), and drag songs from the library to the playlists. Or from playlist to playlist. (To delete a song from a playlist, right click the song and select "Clear".)

When you plug the iPod into the computer, it brings up iTunes and the ipod appears as a device in the "Source" window. If you want to just automatically copy ALL your playlists to the ipod, you can set iTunes up to autosync with iTunes on connection. In that case, it just dumps everything from your iTunes library onto the iPod, playlists and all. This is how it's configured by default.

If you have more music in iTunes than will fit on the iPod (like me), you can either change the options to only sync certain playlists, or you can deselect the autosync option and load it manually by drag-and-drop (my preference, because I'm sort of a control freak). You manually create a playlist on the iPod the same way you do on the hard drive...you just need to be sure you have the iPod selected in the Source window when you hit the Add Playlist button (+). Anytime you drag a song or playlist from your computer library (anything in the Source window) to the iPod, it copies the music file(s) from your computer to the iPod. You can also put the same song in multiple playlists without having multiple copies on the iPod.

(This really does make sense once you start using iTunes, I promise. As you know, if you already use it.)

How does it fit in there? The ipod is basically a storage device that plays music, like any MP3 player. The average music file is around 3-4 MB in size, and you can buy iPods that hold anywhere from 120 (512MB Shuffle, which doesn't do multiple playlists) to 10,000 songs (40GB regular iPod). The mini's 4GB hard drive will hold about 1,000 songs. All of the songs I listen to regularly, 5 church sermon CDs, and an audiobook use up about 1/3 of my available space.

Can you pgm it to play songs in the order you want? For any length you want? Say I want a 60 min tape to run by w/slow music for the warm up and cool down, can I just set it to play 70 mins of music and it will stop @ that point? Yes, on all counts. What you would do is create a playlist of the songs you want in the order you want, and copy that playlist to your iPod. You can make playlists as long as you want--both of my main playlists have over 60 songs in them (3-5 hours of music), but I also have playlists with 5 or fewer songs on them (my wedding music, for instance). It plays the songs in order by default, and stops playing when the playlist is up. You can also set it to shuffle play, and/or to start back at the beginning when a playlist is over. I think you can set different playlists to play different ways, too, though I could be wrong on that. I do shuffle-play on all of mine, because I like the variety. I have thought about doing playlists in a warmup-workout-cooldown format, but haven't gotten around to it yet. I know it's definitely possible.

So yeah...I hope that helped you. Sorry if I overexplained...I have a tendency to do that. :)

thank you thank you thank you thank you!!!

I TOTALLY get it.

You were so GREAT to type all that up :) very detailed and answers all my questions.

I guess what tripped me up is I have a sony CD player that says it also plays mp3's so I couldn't get how the ipod played mp3's too. I was thinking by default an mp3 was were CD sized. But I see it's more like a storage unit.

I have add'l storage for my computer thats the size of my pinkie. I now get that the ipod is more like that, in it's plug in & use function, than the cd player.

Ok off to see how much on of those babies will set me back *wince*

;)