4 Wishes for the gen 5 iPod
1. Gapless audio
Quick, what’s one thing a ten dollar cd player can do that a six hundred dollar iPod can’t? That’s right, play gapless audio. Don’t get me wrong, I love my photo iPod. Showing pictures is cool and all and the album cover integration is sweet. Still, more than seeing the cover of Kind of Blue, I’d love to be able to listen to it in the original way it was intended. It is outrageous that a $600 iPod can’t do this.
2. An Equalizer
Another item that medium level walkmans have had for eons is an equalizer. The iPods’s current equalizer is limited to presets; you are stuck with generic settings like jazz, rock, etc. Apple needs to integrate a fully adjustable equalizer.
3. An adjustable UI.
The current iPod interface is renowned for its ease of use. But it is too simple for us power users. There needs to be an additional layer or way to navigate through the iPod. My friend Dave brought up one great example: let’s say you are enjoying a randomly playing song and decide you want to listen to the next song on the album. The only thing you can do is navigate back to the setting menu, turn off shuffle, then navigate back to the album and pick the song. Ugh. There are countless other examples of where the UI falls short.
3. A sports iPod.
Remember those wonderful bright yellow sony wallkmans. They kept the elements out, and could survive the slings and arrows of portable music player misfortune with aplomb. Apple should come out with a sports iPod. Assuming it is a HD based device it would be able to absorb the shocks of a mountain bike excursion and the sand from a beach. A sports iPod would also have the benefit of being marvelously retro.
4. A Radio
This is another item that can be found in even the cheapest of walkmans and even in iTunes. But not in an iPod. This fall, on my bus ride home I didn’t want to listen to my iTunes Music Store purchases: I wanted to listen to the Red Sox cream St. Louis (sorry, Chris).
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Comments
Cant you just use an 1/8 > 1/4 adapter??
i just read that nameless post about apple being regressive… i just wanted to mention that the shuttle pc he is talking about is almost 3 TIMES the size of the mac mini (not to mention a 3rd the price)... i think that is pretty innovative in and of itself… and about the unwillingness to change bad features; i don’t think he has taken a look at some of the up comming features in tiger eh? last i checked it fixed most of my qualms with panther (namely that stupid little beachball)... or even just the new version of iphoto… it seems they are (contrary to what some may believe) listening to feed back…
Are you kidding? iPhoto has rolled out the red carpet for the RETURN OF THE BEACH BALL! Everything you do in iPhoto is slower now, and that new transparent brightness/hue/levels popup CRAWLS. I am so disappointed in it. Sorry for the off topic.
that 1/8” is an out… not an in…
also, the sport ipod is the ipod shuffle…
—also, i would venture to think the idea of radio on an mp3 player is kinda overkill… i mean, i use my mp3 player in my car so i don’t have to listen to my radio… (but then again i do like some talk radio so it depends really)
—finally (i promise ill stop posting after this one…) the way you can use ITMS songs on a different player is by burning them to CD and ripping them off the cd… redundant? yes. but it works… and the AAC format is probably the best format out there as far a digital rights management goes. (i know mp3 and ogg are great, but the idea of the music stores is to get people to actually buy the music, i know it would be nice if musicians can trust people on a promise and a prayer but they can’t, thats why napster took off.)
now don’t get me wrong, i have just as much downloaded music as the next guy, but i am also (as you might have guessed) a musician, therefore i believe that SOME musicians deserve to be paid for what they do… therefore i totally support the AAC format.
i made a mistake… sorry:
i just wanted to mention that the shuttle pc he is talking about is almost 3 TIMES the size of the mac mini (not to mention a 3rd the price)...
i ment to say the mac mini was a third the price of the shuttle pc.
>>Cant you just use an 1/8 > 1/4 adapter??
OK, its an out only so the solution isnt as simple. But the 3rd party microphones utillize some kind of input to that same 1/8” plug. Perhaps someone has/will make what you need. Send an email to Griffin Technologies, they make things like what you need all the time.
while we are on the topic of wishing impossible(?) things, I want my ipod to shuffle by genre, play count, artist, kind…
to be able to change play order on iPod itself, erase tunes from it, AND I want to be able to sync either way - not only from itunes but from ipod to itunes for the files of my choice
in short I want iTunes and a new and improved iTunes on the iPod, if anyone can do it Apple can…
oh, and that a SPL can be not only match all or any but BOTH criteria
#1 feature I wish they would introduce to the 5G iPod? What I would call “multiple bookmarking” so that when you’re in the middle of one playlist (like an audiobook or something), you can escape, go to another playlist, listen to some music and then come back and resume the first playlist where you left off. Ideally, *every* playlist would remember where it was left when you exit it. Just like many good DVD players, when you go back, you can choose to start again from the beginning, or resume from the break point.
Alright fellow musicains!
Yes, that is the only thing that is keeping me from an iPod too. Recording. (my shuffle is pretty nice though. don’t knock the unscreen till you’ve tried it). The problem isn’t that the 1/8” jack can’t be used for recording. It can, and you don’t really loose anything going from 1/4 to 1/8. The problem is that apple cripples the audio recording down to really [email protected] quality. iPods can record ‘voice recorder quality’. My understanding is that they’re afraid they’ll be used to bootleg concerts, but that makes no sense since you can buy MD recorder if you want to do that. Same basic size. But if I could have my music library AND record decent audio on the go…...then I’d shell out the dough.
If you had a radio, you may be less inclined to get more tunes. I know one entity that wouldn’t want that to happen.