IPod: The Tiny Music Player

By Yonnas Nigussie

Since its launch in October 2001, Apple has sold 100 million iPod music players. This makes the iPod the best selling digital audio player in history. In that time, the device has become as completely synonymous to digital music as Coke has become to soft drinks, as Ambo to Mineral Water, as Vaseline to petroleum jelly . . . you get the idea.

IPod is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple. Devices in the iPod range are primarily digital audio players, designed around a central click wheel-with exception to the iPod shuffle, which uses buttons because of its size. Like many digital music players, iPods can also serve as external data storage devices. In January 2007, Apple announced the iPhone, a device that can combine the features of the video-capable iPod with mobile phone and mobile Internet capabilities.

IPods are made with different model from first to the fifth generation, with different color displays and memory capacity. The iPod I own, has five buttons and the later generation has buttons integrated into the click wheel- as an innovation, which gives an uncluttered, minimalist interface. Using the click wheel in a rotational manner performs the other operations such as scrolling through menu items and controlling the volume, iPod shuffle does not have a click wheel and instead have five buttons positioned differently to the larger models: It has a Play/Pause button in the center, surrounded by four buttons: Volume Up/Down and Skip Forward/Backwards. The latter models automatically pause playback when the headphones are unplugged from the headphone jack, but playback does not resume upon re insertion.

Choosing and listening a studio sound music that I have loaded using the iTune music software which is included on the iPod CD package is very simple with this player. ITune helps to import songs from CD or digital music collection to/from our computer. Then I can organize the songs and transfer to my iPod mini. IPod’s operating system is stored on its dedicated storage medium, every ipod has 32 MB of RAM, it could spin its hard disk up once and copy approximately 30 MB of upcoming songs into RAM, thus save power by not requiring the drive to spin up for each song.

With my iPod mini, I can store thousands of songs from your CD or digital music collection and let’s you listen on the go. I can listen to audio books purchased from the I Tunes Music store or www.audible.com. I can also arrange my music in On-The-Go play lists, store files and other data, using iPod mini as an external hard disk. and change equalizer settings to make music sound better.

Apple’s iTunes software is used to transfer music to the devices. As a free jukebox application, Tunes stores an entire music library on the user’s computer and can play, burn, and rip music from a CD. I can also transfer photos, videos, games, and calendars to the models that support them.

Every time iPod connects to its host Computer, iTune will synchronize the entire music libraries or music play lists and allows the user to choose automatic or manual synchronization. In addition, song rating can be set and synchronized later to the iTunes library, however only one host computer is allowed.

I believe that the popularity of iPod will continue to grow. With support for video, the iPod is quickly transforming from a slick media player into a multimedia powerhouse. And lately iPod has added mobile phone and mobile Internet capabilities. One thing seems almost certain: The iPod isn’t headed toward obscurity any time soon. ˜

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Yonnas Nigussie is a graduate in Information Systems from Addis Ababa University. He works as a Marketing Agent for Ethiopian Airlines.

ICT Focus Magazine, September - October 2007