Understand the Different iPods and Choose the Right One - What Your iPod Doesn’t Do
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So much for what your iPod does and what it consists of. This section discusses some of the things your iPod
doesn’t do and what its limitations are. Some may seem obvious, but if you’re in the market for an iPod, you’ll benefit from being clear on all these points right now.
You Can’t Enter (Much) Information onto Your iPod Directly
Out of the box, your iPod is strictly a play-and-display device: you can’t enter information onto it directly. All the information your iPod contains must come from a computer (a Mac or a PC) across a FireWire cable or USB cable.
This changes if you buy a hardware accessory that’s designed to work with the iPod. (The accessory needs to be specifically designed to work with the iPod, otherwise the iPod won’t recognize it.) You can then input certain types of data—for example, you can record audio or import photos from a digital camera—without connecting your iPod to a computer. (The iPod mini can’t handle these types of input at the time of writing.)
iPod fans and pundits have long predicted an iPod keyboard that will let you type text onto your iPod, but Apple hasn’t obliged yet. At this writing, dictating voice memos is as good as text entry gets.
The iPod Isn’t the Smallest or Most Skip-Proof Player in Town
Because your iPod is based around a hard drive, it’s far larger than the smallest digital audio players around. Some of the smallest players are around the size of a cigarette lighter, while a regular iPod is more the size of a packet of cigarettes, and an iPod mini is the size of a stack of credit cards.
Your iPod is also less resistant to skips than solid-state players that store data on flash memory rather than on a hard disk. But as you’ll see in the section “What You Might Want to Know About Your iPod’s Internals,” in Chapter 13, Apple has done some clever engineering to reduce skipping caused by the hard drive being knocked around. That said, if you need a super-lightweight, supertough, or wholly skip-proof digital audio player, you should probably look beyond the iPod.
One solution is to use your iPod for most of your music and buy an inexpensive, low-capacity digital audio player for your higher-energy or higher-impact pursuits. That way, if you wipe out while trying to set a new speed record on your street luge, you won’t need to buy a new iPod—just a titanium ultraportable player, a pair of Kevlar shorts, and a pack of Moleskin.
Your iPod Supports Only AAC, MP3, WAV, and AIFF Audio Formats
At the time of this writing, your iPod supports only a limited range of audio formats: AAC, MP3 (including Audible.com’s AA format), WAV, and AIFF. Your iPod doesn’t support major formats such as the following:
- Windows Media Audio (WMA), Microsoft’s proprietary format. WMA has built-in digital rights management (DRM) capabilities and is used by several of the largest online music stores (such as Napster 2.0).
- RealAudio, the RealNetworks format in which much audio is streamed across the Internet and other networks.
- Ogg Vorbis, the new open-source audio format intended to provide royalty-free competition to MP3.
Because you can convert audio files from one format to another, and because the MP3 format is very widely used, this limitation isn’t too painful. But if your entire music library is in, say, WMA or Ogg format, you’ll have to do some work before you can use it on your iPod. Worse, if your songs are in another compressed format, you’ll lose some audio quality when you convert them to AAC or MP3.
 This chapter is from How to Do Everything with your iPod and iPod Mini, by Guy Hart-Davis (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004, ISBN: 0072254521). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now. |
Next: Distinguish the Three Generations of iPods and the iPod Mini >>
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