So, as I had mentioned in a previous post, I bought a 1GB iPod shuffle a little while back. I have to admit, it’s a pretty sexy little device. Being the hardware junkie that I am, how could I say no? I’ve really enjoyed using it so far, and aside from a couple of misgivings, it’s definitely worth the money, if it fits your needs. However, in retrospect, it has one major (if not fatal) flaw that Apple really needs to correct (hell, at least explaning it would be nice) before I’d consider it perfect.

Now you see, the iPod shuffle hooks into iTunes to let you build playlists and load them on to the device. This entire communications process is quite seamless (though iTunes on Windows is a bit sluggish at times, even my relatively fast machine.) I either manually put together a playlist, or let it pick one for me - what I tend to do is rate all of my songs (iTunes lets you rate each track from 1-5 stars), then generate a playlist based on a filter of what I feel like listening to. All in all, a pretty slick process, very intuitive for the most part. Once my playlist is built, I hit one button and it gets copied over to the shuffle, and I can either play the songs off the device in the order of the playlist, or as the name entails, shuffle them up and listen to them out of order. All well and good so far.

Where the flaw comes into play is that with a regular iPod, you can “sync”/attach your device to multiple computers. What I’ve done in the past (with older, non-iPod MP3 players) is load songs from both my office and home desktop and mix and match that way - I have two totally separate music databases, since I tend to snag new tracks from co-workers at the office who have their libraries available on our local network. So ideally, I would want to sync with 2 pretty disparate collections. Now, this process (as I understand it), works perfectly with the regular iPod devices. However, with the shuffle, Apple has built in a limitation that allows you to only sync with one PC at a time. Why, I don’t know - I’m guessing they want shuffle owners to buy a larger, more expensive iPod if they want to do what I was planning to do.

Here’s a quote from Apple’s tech support site:

Can I take a friend’s iPod shuffle and browse or play its content on my machine (like I can with other iPods)?
No, there is no manual mode that allows you to view or play the content from a friend’s iPod shuffle on your computer. This also means that you cannot load music from multiple computers or iTunes libraries onto iPod shuffle like you can with other iPods.

This bothers me.

It cuts the device functionality in half. Without jumping through some major hoops (some ingenious shuffle owners out there have devised alternative manual synching methods), you can’t do much in my situation aside from partitioning the shuffle into a split flash memory structure and copying all your music to a single machine before loading up your playlist. This is highly inconvenient for people who work/use iTunes on two (or more) separate machines, and honestly doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for such a small, versatile and portable device.

The only reasoning I can come up with is that (a) there’s some kind of hardware limitation preventing Apple from allowing the loading of music from multiple computers, (b) it’s yet another ill-conceived copy-protection scheme (which doesn’t make sense considering the copy-protection is built into the music data files from iTunes), or (c) they’re just trying to make consumers buy both a shuffle and a regular iPod.

Anyhow, to end my rant - the shuffle is an excellent device for people who generally stick with a single computer as their music library. If you’re on the go and want to load a quick playlist, it definitely makes sense to purchase it. It’s well-designed, sleek, and barely noticeable to carry around all day. For myself, I’ll probably have to consider upgrading to a full-sized iPod to get the functionality I need (well, want is probably more fitting.)

So, I guess I’m falling into Apple’s upgrade trap after all.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Posted in Gadgets, Rants |