Life of the IT-Drummer

[All images are taken from Syl2m (http://www.flickr.com/photos/syl2m/), except the one with the generation-comparison - it's from digitalbear (http://www.flickr.com/photos/minami/), both on a Creative Commons license]

A couple of days ago my Creative Zen Stone mp3-player called it a day, and stopped working (with a high pitched noise). The Zen Stone is a competitor of Apples iPod Shuffle second generation, a small mp3-player without display. I was forced to buy a new mp3-player, and I thought I’d give Apple another go (I have owned two 20 gig 4th generation iPod (”classics”) before) with their beautiful new iPod Shuffle third generation. The big disadvantage choosing the shuffle is that you’ll have to use the accompanying headphones, because the headphones has the controls. More discussion about this feature later. I needed headphones as well, so for me, it felt like a good choice.

First impressions:
When I got my hands on the box, I was surprised over the size of it. It was really small!
has been thinking about the environment, I like that. The player itself was also very small and lightweight, but still felt remarkably sturdy. The headphones were fairly regular, with a short cord. These small sizes suited me fine, as I’ve been dragging around a two meter long cord with my Sennheiser HD595-headset (which is pretty funny when you have a Zen Stone mp3-player)

About the player:
The player costs 679 norwegian kroner (107 USD), which may seem a bit pricy compared to some of Creatives players (which costs around 400 kroner / 64 USD). I still feel it’s worth the extra 200 bucks for the quality. The Creative Zen Stone litteraly fell apart after a year of use. It’s capacity is 4 gigabytes, which is decent enough for such a small device. The battery lasts for 10 hours (according to apples home site), and the design is like all Apple products, very nice. It’s simple and clean, and it feels solid. It takes 2 hours to charge 80% and 3 hours to charge 100%. It comes with a usb-device for charging/connecting to computer. Charging with a device which uses the power outlet must be bought seperately. There’s a solid clip on the backside, so you can attach the Shuffle anywhere.

How do we use it?
There is only one switch on the Shuffle itself, the rest of the input is done with the headphone-controller. The switch on the Shuffle can be put in “on (but no shuffle)”, “on (shuffle”) or off. When you flick the switch the headphones makes a little “swoosh” noise.

There’s a small light indicator which gives you information about the battery levels, or if it’s safe to remove the device from your computer. The light is extremly small, but OK in visibility. If it’s light in the room, there might be issues. It also indicates if your playing or pausing (it blinks when you pause it).

The headphones has a little thing with three buttons. Two of them are “Volume up” and “Volume down”, while the last one is more “magical”. Here is what it does:

• 1 click: Play/Stop
• 2 clicks: Next Song
• 3 clicks: Previous song
• Press and hold: speak title of song and name of band.
• Press and hold till a sound occurs: Choose playlist.

Most of these are self explanatory. The last one is the most challenging one to learn. The device speaks the name of each playlist in turn (with “all songs” and “podcasts” as choices which always occur) and then you have to press the “magic” button when it’s beeing said (or slightly after) in order to choose that playlist. I have never chosen the wrong playlist, so I guess that feature works pretty well. I think it would be really annoying if you have more than 5 playlists, it steals time.

The “speak title and artist”-button works ok. It’s kinda hard to hear what’s beeing said with my Windows Vista-synced shuffle. I had a Podcast of “Radioresepsjonen” (a norwegian radio show) on my Shuffle, and to my surprise the Shuffle said the title in german, said by a man. The default is a female english lady. Quite funny. I haven’t yet figured out if it’s possible to change the default language. I believe apple claims they have support for 20 different languages.

The controller in general works pretty well, it has a fast response and it makes the right choice according to my decision 99/100 times.

The sound from the headphones are surprisingly OK, and it does not feel uncomfortable to have them in your ear. They are far better than many cheap headphones I’ve bought in my days.

Comparison of the three Shuffle generations:

My general thoughts with some critisism:
There are a couple of issues which are quite apple-related. First of all you have to (unless you do some kind of hacks) use iTunes to sync it. This forces you to start using iTunes. That being said, iTunes is a quite decent program. The synchronization with the Shuffle is done flawless, and it’s easy to find music, and make playlists. The iTunes store is great for buying music or downloading podcasts.

If you consider buying one of these, keep in mind that there is a tight connection between the player and the headphones. This is a bullet you’ll have to take if you want this product. After what I can see, there’s no adapter for this yet, and when it comes, I’m sure it’ll be costly. Apple has one in-ear alternative, which costs a little less than the whole iPod Shuffle itself, but probably has better sound. For me, this is not a great concern.

Some of the problems with this device, is that you can’t rewind/forward tracks. This is usually not that big of a problem, but it can be REALLY annyoing if you listen to a podcast, and you’re not where you left it. The best solution to this problem is to play the podcast in iTunes to where you want to listen from, and then sync it to the Shuffle. Then it will start playing where you stopped listening in iTunes.

Another issue is that there really isn’t any great way of finding spesific music. If you want to listen to one song, the best way is to make lots of playlists, switch to the right playlist, put on random and play until you find a track from the same album, and then search forward or backwards for that one song (which is kinda hard, two- or three clicks for times the number of tracks skipped = a lot of clicks). So the Shuffle lives up to it’s name. It works best by just shuffling.

All in all:
There’s no doubt that this products gives you a lot for the money. You actually get a quality product for an affordable price. The product works just as good as it’s been described by apple themselves. Even thought I have some critisism, I still think it’s a product worth buying if you’re one of those weirdos who can live without display. If you can live with only “ok+” headphones, and like iTunes, this will be a great match. If not, or you use linux (not supported), then maybe you should go with something else.

I give it 5/6 points. Or 8/10.

Here’s a review from VG, the biggest newspaper in norway: Link (Let’s hope this twinglystuff works. :-))

Update: The plastic ring on the earpiece of the headset falls off pretty easy, which is fairly annoying. It happened to me in a few months time. Another important thing is that you can choose playlist a lot quicker than what I’ve sketched up in this review. Just press the volume up/down-buttons.