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So maybe you heard, yesterday I bought an iPod Shuffle. From now on I’ll be using ‘ipod’ over ‘iPod’ because the librarian in me says ‘use the authority file’ but the cynical part of me says ‘the capital P looks really lame.’ Elizabeth’s ipod, which I stole — er, have been sharing — a while back, is having hardware problems and I don’t think we ever bought her AppleCare for it. It hasn’t been an issue, because it plays well as long as it’s using the line in jack of our car and I have it plugged into the cigarette lighter that doesn’t actually have a cigarette lighter in it. But she just accepted a position that’s not four blocks from where I work, meaning that I’m going to be biking again. This is good, but means I need a new fancy music playing device.

I’ll save you the train of thought leading up to my choice and suffice it to say that I walked into Best Buy and bought myself a shuffle. The clerk asked me what color and I was caught off guard, so after realizing Apple runs their plastic through a Fluffy Bunny Pastelization Filter before applying it I just chose silver. I opened the package while waiting for Elizabeth to get done with a meeting, so I’ll throw out the warning for future shuffle buyers: have some damn scissors handy. After 5-10 minutes of prying and sawing with my keys I was finally able to yank the box out of the wrapping. Can we get rid of clamshell packaging yet?

The main concern I had about the shuffle was that I still needed to listen to podcasts. I only listen to a handful (some people just ramble on and on), but I look forward to a Wednesday morning Giant Bombcast and a Friday morning Basic Brewing Radio (not to mention Lying Media Bastards, which seems to be semi-annual at this point). With no screen, there can be no ‘Podcast’ tab, and the nature of a shuffle means that my 90 minutes of video game talk will be sandwiched somewhere between The Card Cheat and Nice Weather For Ducks. There’s no room for documentation in that tiny case, though I did find some on their site in PDF form, but this is how you do it:

1. Autofill the shuffle (or not, if you’d like)
2. Take off a few Marilyn Manson songs to make some room
3. Wonder why you still have Marilyn Manson songs in your library
4. Add the podcast(s) manually (drag them from the Podcast tab in iTunes onto the Shuffle)
5. Drag the podcast(s) to the top of the list

The shuffle won’t play anything tagged Skip when Shuffling (which all podcasts are by default), so when I’m at the gym I’ll only get music. When I want to listen to mah stories, I switch it to Play in Order and press play three times to restart. Since it remembers the playback position of the podcast, it will pick up where I left off. Last night I had an hour of random songs on the elliptical, got into the car and resumed hearing exactly how much I did wrong on the mead I started on Monday.

Now, then, does anyone know if the songs will repeat before all of them are played? That would be an interesting feature.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under I am an Apple fanboy, Personal. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.