Radio iPod Starts Broadcasting in My Headphones

I finally succumbed to reason and bought myself an iPod, and this purchase is completely changing my life.  You see I love music, and have hundreds of CDs that I have collected over the years and have scattered around my house.  CDs with jazz, rock, fusion, country, bluegrass, Indian music, classical, hip-hop, and even comedy.  At one point I thought the secret to organizing this pastiche of music was to convert it all to MP3s and put it on my computer so I could quickly create playlists.

This was a good idea except for one thing: I didn't really want to sit next to my computer to listen to music.

A few years ago I bought an MP3 player (Archos Jukebox) thinking that I would finally be able to listen to my music "on the go."  For various reasons this didn't work, and I concluded that I simply didn't like to listen to music as much as I thought I did.

The only time I listened to music was in the car, usually just whatever was on the radio.  Sometimes, I'd make the effort to pop in  CD.  But the problem with the CD was that I'd get bored listening to the same artist song after song.  I liked the unpredicability of the Radio, except that radio station playlists are so narrow now that you hear the same songs over and over.  Radio, thanks to the lack of diversity in ownership and programming, is only slightly more "unpredicatable" than putting in a 5 CD changer.  But I didn't want to put in a CD changer in my car.

So I bought an iPod and decided to give the MP3 thing one last shot.  After I bought my new 15 GB unit and synchronized it with the 2,500 songs I had stored in my computer I was amazed at how easy it was to listen to music.  You can browse by artist, album, or even genre of music.  But the most amazing revelation came when my friend Jeff Richardson told me how to use the iPod to maximum effect.

You set the "shuffle play" to go from song-to-song (the other choice is from album to album).  Then your iPod will randomly play any of the thousand songs that you have stored in your device.  I didn't grasp how fully amazing this was until I started doing it for a few days.  Bottom line: it's way cool.  Now I use my iPod on song shuffle play 75% of the time.  It's like having your own radio station that will play anything from the universe of different songs and musical styles, and you don't know which song or style is coming up next.

What happens if you are presented with a song or mood of music that you aren't interested in?  Just hit the "next" button and it picks out a new song/style.   In fact, this simple revelation has changed my approach to the music that I plan on loading into my iPod.

Rather than thinking in terms of albums or songs, I'm thinking of new styles of music that I can seed the iPod with.  How diverse can I make the range of music that I'm presented with.  Hell, I'll even listen to Rap.  After all it's only for one song.  And I might even like it.

Who needs Radio, or even Satellite Radio?  I've got an iPod.  But now I'm thinking: maybe I should have gotten the 30 GB model.

Last update: 6/13/2003; 1:00:22 PM.