How would you improve the Apple iPod?

January 11, 2006 9:59 AM

If you were to create an MP3 player then, using the Apple iPod as a baseline for "good", what improvements would you make to it?

I'm more interested in software, UI and internal hardware changes that you'd make rather than external look and feel. So "gapless playback" is useful but "reposition the hold switch" isn't so much.

For those wondering, I'm using the iPod as a baseline because in my opinion its a damn good device and the one that I have the most experience with. I'm not planning on making an iPod competitor either.

I also know there are other sites out there which asked the same question but I feel that Ask Metafilter has a better cross-section of users.

Finally, my starter for two: gapless playback and an easier way to jump to the album of a song which is currently playing in shuffle mode.

posted by mr_silver to technology (66 comments total)

The thing that I think the iPod gets completely, utterly wrong is that it won't let me just plug it into a computer and drag mp3s to it as a disk.
posted by mendel at 10:07 AM on January 11, 2006

I have a large library, and browsing by artist is a pain in the ass because it involves so much scrolling, and when I scroll quickly I often overshoot my target... I'd love to (optionally) be able to sort my artist listing alphabetically... so that I could click on MUSIC -> ARTISTS -> F -> FLAMING LIPS
posted by Robot Johnny at 10:07 AM on January 11, 2006

(And off of it, for that matter, with filenames and stuff intact.)
posted by mendel at 10:08 AM on January 11, 2006

I really wish I could make it play podcasts continuously instead of stopping at the end of each. I know I could make a playlist, but I really shouldn't have to.
posted by nathan_teske at 10:10 AM on January 11, 2006

I'd add an AM/FM radio with the ability to record live, as well as schedule recordings to occur without manual intervention. Also, might as well build in an FM transmitter so you wouldn't have to buy the third-party iTrip-like devices.
posted by odinsdream at 10:10 AM on January 11, 2006

One of the main reasons the iPod (and most commercially-available MP3 players) is the lack of Ogg support. All of the music I've ripped from my CDs over the years is done to Ogg, so a portable music player that didn't handle it would be rather useless to me.

/proud rio karma owner
posted by Godbert at 10:10 AM on January 11, 2006

Oh - and what mendel said - absolutely without a doubt that should be implemented before any other improvements. Normal disk access to the device.
posted by odinsdream at 10:11 AM on January 11, 2006

It would be great if the menus were circular (or something). Say I go to MUSIC -> ARTISTS -> Death Cab for Cutie -> Six Feet Under (Album). There is only one song by them on that album, but I'd like to be able to get to the rest of the album easily
posted by pithy comment at 10:11 AM on January 11, 2006

I would like to see an FM tuner. I listen to a ton of music but sometimes I want to listen to NPR while walking the pooch.

The ability to sort by directory and file name is up there as well. I wish ID3 tags were never invented.
posted by hendrixson at 10:12 AM on January 11, 2006

Microphone with appropriate software for recording concerts, interviewing people, and managing files.
posted by johngoren at 10:14 AM on January 11, 2006

Gapless playback (and a bigger built-in cache), longer battery life, support for FLAC, support for Replaygain, a better equalizer, digital line out without dock, the ability to skip by album.

I wouldn't even mind sacrificing some of its thinness to get the features. It doesn't have to be ridiculously thin, it just needs to be small enough to fit into my pocket.
posted by antiform at 10:21 AM on January 11, 2006

Microphone and a simple one button voice memo recording that would save itself to a "memo" playlist and sync up to your computer.
posted by bondcliff at 10:21 AM on January 11, 2006

I agree with Robot Johnnie... an easier way to scroll through long lists of albums and artists would make it easier for me to use. The FM receiver would also be nice.
posted by lhauser at 10:26 AM on January 11, 2006

Maybe you should be starting with the Cowon X5 as the start point as it already has Ogg/Flac/FM radio plus record/Voice-memo record/USB host .
The little nubbin button is annoying so maybe starting from a device that has a lot of the requests above and changing the hardware is a better approach.
I think the ipod works so well because it doesnt have to deal with radios etc . Once that functionality is added the controls become more complicated by necessity.
posted by stuartmm at 10:27 AM on January 11, 2006

I second bondcliff. I would definitely use an iPod as a voice recorder if it continued to be roughly nano-sized.

I use (and love) ID3 tags and iTunes-like organization through metadata; I actually feel that this is the thing the iPod got right first.

My other big one: cross-faded playback, esp. on demand (i.e., if I'm in the middle of a song, and then select another song, I'd like to hear a smooth, cross-faded transition between the two.)
posted by josh at 10:31 AM on January 11, 2006

Just because Microsoft tricked me into converting my music to WMA shouldn't mean that Apple doesn't want my money. In any case I wouldn't consider buying one until they support it. And make a 200GB version.
posted by loquax at 10:36 AM on January 11, 2006

I'd like to be able to delete songs and organize files directly from the iPod.
posted by lunalaguna at 10:37 AM on January 11, 2006

I've always found the iPod's handling of what's currently playing to be confusing. There should be an easy way, from wherever you are in the menus, to jump to the playlist or album that's playing (not just the "Now Playing" song). Also, if you go to Now Playing and then hit Menu, rather than taking you to the main menu, it should take you back to the album, and then the artist, or to the playlist, or however you got there; in other words, drill back up in the same way you drilled down to start playing the tracks.
posted by staggernation at 10:37 AM on January 11, 2006

make it more like this
posted by brilliantmistake at 10:39 AM on January 11, 2006

Not just cross-faded playback, but adjustable cross-fading.

Also, the ability to add songs to an "On-The-Go" playlist while the song is playing. This can be done now, but only by Menu-ing back to the song title list, so when the song title list isn't just one Menu click away (i.e., during Shuffle), the functionality is gone.
posted by grabbingsand at 10:48 AM on January 11, 2006

I'm not an iPod user, but several of the reasons I chose not to get an iPod are listed above: can't simply copy songs between computer and player; can't organize songs and playlists however the user sees fit; difficulty of finding items in lists which have potentially thousands of entries. The player I do use, an Archos Jukebox Recorder with the third-party open source Rockbox firmware installed, does have these. So you might poke about the Rockbox documentation and discussion pages to see what other features Rockbox has which would be useful in an MP3 player. Another feaure of Rockbox that I really like is that what information is displayed while a song is playing (the "While Playing Screen," or WPS, in Rockbox terminology) is highly customizable by the user.

I'm not trying to start an iPod vs. Rockbox war here, and I am certainly not claiming that a player using Rockbox is better than an iPod for everyone. Each has some features the other does not have, and different people will want different things out of an MP3 player.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:49 AM on January 11, 2006

See: Engadget asking same question and Engadget asking about iPod video specicially.
posted by scottreynen at 11:01 AM on January 11, 2006

Another vote for a better way to search for music. Something simple, even like using the wheel to select letters individually, being able to limit the search to albums or artist or whatnot, and being able to go back and refine your search without having to input all letters in again.
posted by Meagan at 11:02 AM on January 11, 2006

I really dislike the ipod. Ignoring my dislike of it becoming a fashion statement, my reasons are based very much around how I want to use an mp3 player. So I present a list of things that bug me about the ipod.

Gapless playback. Not a requirement but definately a niceity.

Itunes. I do not get along with itunes. First off it chews up processor unecessarily and generally doesn't have the plugins I wish. But the way you handle the "current" playlist" doesn't jive with my wishes. I much prefer how winamp handles playlists and libraries.

Itunes. I do not wish to be tied to a specific program to load music. This is particularly an issue since I would like to load my mp3 players from linux. Yes there exists software to do this, but it is generally kludgey and flakey. I want it to just work.

Playlist creation on device. For how I wish to use a portable mp3 player, I really need to be able to make an on the fly playlist easily. I want to be able to do things like, play all of genre FOO randomly. Or play all of artist foo, bar, and baz randomly. I want to be able to reorder a playlist as it is playing. So say I am listening to a genre randomly and while listening to a song by a particular artist I want to listen to more by that artist, I want to either insert more songs by that artist after the currently playing song, or I want to be able to move other songs up in the playlist.

the scrollwheel. My fingers are reasonably nimble and I have good fine motor control, but I can't get used to the scroll wheel, I am just plain klutzy with it.

Mass storage device. The device should show up as a plain mass storage device on a modern computer with NO driver installation.

dock. the dock needs to include decent quality line level audio connections. My preference would be for optical, but I'll take standard rca jacks. None of these crappy headphone jacks.
posted by fief at 11:10 AM on January 11, 2006

fief--a lot of the things you don't like are implemented--or almost implemented--on the iPods. Playlist creation on device, for example, while not as versatile as you want (or as I want, for that matter), works; and if you want to play all songs of genre "foo" randomly, just make sure shuffle is selected and browse by genre.

And on Macs, it's easy to use the iPod as an external hard drive. I don't know why they don't allow that on Windows.

My personal vote would be the ability to automaticall sync with certain playlists but still allow me to drag and drop--for example, my "Recently Added" playlist should automatically sync, but I still want to be able to drag and drop depending on my mood. I know that I can just drag the playlist to the iPod, but I'm lazy and I like things automated.
posted by maxreax at 11:31 AM on January 11, 2006

Why on earth doesn't the Ipod come with FM? Or work as a mass storage device? I just bought an iAudio X5 for just these reasons.
posted by LarryC at 11:39 AM on January 11, 2006

stuartmm. agreed with what you said about the cowon. the little nubby thing gets very annoying. a scrollwheel similar to the ipod would be useful here, but it should maintain the same way the menus are scrolled through now.
posted by xospecialk at 11:40 AM on January 11, 2006

Ipod music selection is the worst of all worlds for me. My other MP3 player (which runs rockbox) is much more useful - the ipod system creates masses of clutter you have to navigate through, so I tend to just give up and use it on shuffle.

Expanded explanation: If I want to find stuff to play on the Ipod (for say, a trip, a walk, cycling, whatever), there is no way around scrolling through buckets of rubbish, which is dangerous if your eyes are meant to be on the road, and merely annoying and time-consuming otherwise.

- if I choose by album, my actual albums are swamped by all the "albums" that only consist of one or two tracks from an album in which I don't want the other songs (I have a 4Gb nano, so not enough space to put on a full album that I don't like for just one song that I do like)

- if I choose by artist, my actual artist selection is swamped by masses of names from compilation albums that only have one or two songs attached to them

- the same goes for selecting by genre, or indeed any other selection option my ipod seems to offer - masses of non-useful options drowning out the useful options.


My ideal solution would be a hybrid system that can regonise both folder organisation, and ID3 tags. Meaning you could use it as vanilla ipod if that was what you were used to, or you could go the other extreme and use no ID3 tags at all, just subfolders (eg Rock->Garbage->ver2.0 [play]), or (and this is the useful bit) limit the ID3-based selections by folder, such that ipod-style music selection becomes a workable system.

Ie, I could put Pop albums in a folder, and ballroom dance albums in a folder, and then when I'm cycling, my selections aren't cluttered with unsuitable ballroom content, and vice versa; when in a studio, I can select by genre (specific dance type) without scrolling through hundreds of crappy vague genres IMBD randomly assigned to ripped CDs, the only options in the list are the ones I want to choose from.

Of course, to allow music to be organised into folders, in addition to ID3, means allowing proper access to the drive. As has been said above, the ipod is crippled as an mp3 player by not working properly as a USB drive and (as part of that problem) storing music in it own arbitrary set of non-human-readable folders, instead of letting you use a set of folders that makes sense and greatly improves the ID3 navigation system.
posted by -harlequin- at 11:42 AM on January 11, 2006

You actually can use the ipod as an external hard drive, you just have to flip a setting on it.

You also aren't tied to iTunes. I use MediaMonkey and Anapod Explorer (I only need to use one, but I poke around with both)...

My biggest improvements:

- Gapless playback (UGH this irritates me with mine)
- Not limiting recording to a crappy bitrate
- Something like this or this integrated into the ipod.. these docks allow you to navigate your music collection on your ipod via your TV when it is docked - basically turning an ipod into a stereo component you can actually USE from far away.. Don't talk to me about remotes. If I'm far enough away to use a remote, I can't read the ipod's screen :-)

I agree with the above sentiments that the "on the go" playlist SUCKS. The Dell DJ's "Now Playing" functionality is much better... you can click on a song or album, get a context menu, and add that song to the now playing playlist or go straight to playing it... I loved it (had a DJ before my iPod)...

I still love my ipod, but the stuff above would make it damn near perfect... Now I just need one that has more like 200gb capacity... and no moving parts... yea...
posted by twiggy at 11:52 AM on January 11, 2006

maxreax:
"And on Macs, it's easy to use the iPod as an external hard drive. I don't know why they don't allow that on Windows."

My understanding is that it's exactly the same problem on both platforms - plug in the ipod, and the only USB drive functionality you get is the folders and files that aren't your music. If you set your system to show hidden files, then you can see your music files, but they're not named or ordered to be human-readable, eg instead of
Nothing Else Matters - Metallica.mp3,
you would have
ml_ipod0125.mp3
which really cripples the usefulness of a player.
posted by -harlequin- at 11:53 AM on January 11, 2006

Also, UI:

The Apple approach: We have put some of the best minds we have on this, and designed a good system, and all users must use this system as we intended. They will not mind the rails because it is a good system with much research gone into making it user friendly. In fact, it's considerably better than what most of them could come up with on their own, so we're doing (most of) them a favor.

The open source approach: Every damn person contributing to this project has their own weird-ass ideal of how it should work. People are opinionated jackasses, and they'll argue the merits of their screwy approach over everyone else's screwy approach until the cows come home, and not a lick of code will get written. If anyone puts my foot down as says "we're doing it this way, and that's final", EVERYONE will be pissed off and not want to spend their valuable time coding it, since they don't get what they want out of it. The only way to get this thing done is to include a simple human-readable config that allows EVERY LAST SETTING AND ASSUMPTION to be changed, tweaked, disabled, or edited. So the UI can be configuered into EVERY weird-ass system that each person was pushing for. Make EVERYONE happy. The bastards.


I think the ideal UI is a well-crafted system like what apple would provide, but with that config system sitting in the background meaning that "You can change anything and everything yourself, and you don't need to be a coder to do it".

Failing that, I prefer high user configurability over well-crafted but railroaded, of course many others prefer the reverse.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:09 PM on January 11, 2006

What mendel and others have said and file transfer...and maybe the ability to receive satellite radio.
posted by TochterAusElysium at 12:11 PM on January 11, 2006

I know this is not the thrust of the question, but there are significant erganomic shortcomings in the ipod. (Well, I'm speaking of my nano, but it's probably true of the whole range).

On another mp3 player, 90% of operation is done easily and accurately without ever needing to take the player out of my pocket, or use the remote. I can either put my hand in my pocket to operate it, or if it's in my jeans pocket (tight), I operate it through the fabric of the jeans. In either scenario above, I might be wearing gloves.

With an ipod in your pocket, you can't tell front from back. I have some on the back to fix this, but then you can't tell top from bottom. (Tracing where the headphone jack is located is another way to work out orientation). In all this fiddling and handling trying to find where the buttons are, a finger has slid across the scroll wheel, which near-instantly and without warning maxes out the volume, blasting my ears, and judging from the pain, possibly contributing to minor but permanent hearing damage.

It needs a non-identical front and back (eg some bumps on one side, might as well stick them on the top of the control buttons, for easy button location through cloth), same goes for top and bottom (the same bumps/buttons should suffice), and if it uses a scroll wheel that by default changes volume, there needs to be a seperate sensitivity setting for volume adjustment that does not affect menu sensitivity.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:25 PM on January 11, 2006

I think the ability to enable shuffle, while playing music, would be great. As far as I know I can't do that: when I've picked a bunch of crap for my "on the go" list and then hit play, the music stops when I tell it to shuffle things. I shouldn't have to enable shuffle globally or set shuffle in a specific playlist to make it work.

For playlists that have shuffle enabled, I'd like it if the device remembered where I left off and gave me the option to start playing from that song the next time I used that playlist. I was surprised to find that my iPod didn't do this by default.

As for the software UI, it should fit the rules set by the OS. A Windows app should look and act like a Windows app; an OSX app should follow the OSX guidelines. The ideal UI would require handing the software to a novice user, watching what they try to do with it, and then making the software do what they expected it to do. The average user shouldn't need to retrain themselves to use the interface. This is probably my #1 issue with iTunes - it may be perfect for a Mac user, but the lack of Explorer-style drag and drop infuriates me, and "get info" and "clear" make no sense to a person that has never used a Mac.

Drag and drop music should be a given. I should be able to grab an album and drag it to the device. Making a playlist and then moving the playlist to the device is one step too many for me. Unnecessary and non-intuitive.

I would also like to see easier portability between computers. If I plug in to my home system and add music, the damn thing should not DELETE every song on my iPod when I plug it in to my laptop just because I don't have that song in my laptop's library. It's my computer and my music, goddammit.

The software should also have some way of scanning the media folder and updating the library. Winamp does this, iTunes does not. If I add or remove a file, it should allow me to tell it to re-scan the music folder and automatically delete missing files or add new ones, rather than giving me a little "x" icon and making me manually remove song titles from the library.

Any option that can be changed while looking at info for a single song should be available to me when looking at multiple songs. Specifically, "skip during shuffle" - I should not have to add this setting one song at a time!
posted by caution live frogs at 12:37 PM on January 11, 2006

-harlequin- : what i loved about my sony MD players must have been the remote. i could navigate that remote control with my eyes closed, skipping folders, turning up the volume, FF, RW, Play, Pause, it was a beautiful thing. too bad sony ruined MD by using SonicStage and now Connect. I've seen the iPod remote...they need to model it after the sony stick remote or something to make it more useful.

I haven't had time (or the money) to check out the iAudio X5 remote yet, but I would love to see how it compares w/ the old sony ones.
posted by xospecialk at 12:39 PM on January 11, 2006

Bluetooth. I want a bluetooth headset. I want my iPod to talk to my cellphone, let rings through, and pause when I answer incoming calls or make outgoing ones. I want the iPod to talk to my mac and start playing whatever I was listening to when I put on my headphones, and start iTunes playing the same thing when I take them off.

One feature that is present on the Shuffle but (curiously) not the Nano or full-sized iPod is on-the-fly downsampling, so that when you load it up, you can fit more songs on.

On-the-go playlists aren't a problem for me. Apple made a design decision about contextual press-n-hold actions that makes sense, and doesn't create an undue burden, IMO.
posted by adamrice at 12:44 PM on January 11, 2006

I got the iAudio X5L because it does: OGG, FLAC, WMA in addition to MP3, has better battery life than almost any other player, plenty of storage, and the FM receiver. I love it. Oh, and I can drag/drop music onto it like a normal external storage device, I'm not forced to use any custom software. (Yay for Linux support)
posted by knave at 12:59 PM on January 11, 2006

I wonder if this question was actually posted by Apple's research team....
posted by pithy comment at 1:09 PM on January 11, 2006

I wonder if this question was actually posted by Apple's research team....

We can only hope!
posted by LarryC at 1:17 PM on January 11, 2006

I'd also like to second knave's point:

"I'm not forced to use any custom software"

That's a big advantage. This was perhaps the most offputting thing about the ipod initially for me - it didn't Just Work, while many other players do Just Work. I was already busy, time was precious, and for no good reason I had to install software onto my computer, learn how to use that software, carry that software around with me in case I wanted to interface the player to a different computer. etc etc. Bad.

That's not to say including custom software is bad, but that it must be optional - the mp3 player should, like a USB drive does, work with whatever software comes standard on the machine, no need to install crap, just hit the ground running right out of the box.
posted by -harlequin- at 1:19 PM on January 11, 2006

oh and another positive about the X5L, is USB OTG. hook up my digital camera to it, BAM! transfers all the pics off it. no need to carry around extra memory, larger memory, or a laptop to transfer digital pics off a camera!
posted by xospecialk at 1:36 PM on January 11, 2006

How about something more radical that hasn't been done to death?

Maybe a plain black shape with seemingly no buttons. Squeeze it twice in your hand to turn it on, display shines through the case and the whole of one side acts as a touch-screen for manipulating an interface that makes heavy use of wheels, sliders and rapid scrolling/dragging. Let users scribble pictures/text and send them to other mobile devices via Bluetooth. Give away multiplayer casual games for download. Include virtual-DJ software for messing about with music in real-time with the touchscreen. And so on.

That's just off the top of my head, and it'd probably be impractical (perhaps irritating) in all kinds of ways, but it'll take something recklessly 'cool' to shake up the market. As long as the competitors are stumbling about following Apple, Apple will happily lead.
posted by malevolent at 1:37 PM on January 11, 2006

does the ipod nano have an oled screen? i think most players could benefit from one especially the X5L. sure video playback is nice, picture viewing is nice, having a pic as a background is nice...but alas...all i really want is an OLED screen...so that it seeminly fades in and out of the case
posted by xospecialk at 1:44 PM on January 11, 2006

The one thing I want most in an mp3 player is one of the things fief mentioned earlier. The ability to temporarily alter playlists on the fly, so that if I hear an artist I want to hear more of while listening to a several thousand song shuffled playlist, there's a quick way to have the playlist play more songs from that artist/album next, and then switch back to random when I've heard enough. And the UI to do it has to be simple enough that I can do it without killing myself in rush hour traffic, so preferably just some kind of toggle.
posted by shinji_ikari at 2:06 PM on January 11, 2006

The lack of ability to add a bunch of tracks/albums to the active queue is the only reason I haven't and won't buy an ipod.

I wouldn't use itunes either, but there are decent alternatives.

I'd also welcome a smaller, non-photo/video, 60gb model with an old-school monochrome screen and amazing battery life.
posted by dickasso at 2:10 PM on January 11, 2006

I'd also welcome a smaller, non-photo/video, 60gb model with an old-school monochrome screen and amazing battery life.

What is it with people's complaints about the 12-16 hours of battery life that the iPod gets?

I'd say I'm a "heavy user" and I charge my ipod every other day... how is this an inconvenience? You put it on your nightstand when you go to bed and plug it in... even if you listened every waking hour of the day - that'd be roughly 16, and the ipod would almost make it as a "charge nightly" device, which your cell phone almost undoubtedly is.

How much better do you really need the battery to be?

I'd much rather see useful features... not increase the price a boatload just so I can be so damned lazy I only have to charge it once a week...
posted by twiggy at 2:13 PM on January 11, 2006

The lack of ability to add a bunch of tracks/albums to the active queue is the only reason I haven't and won't buy an ipod.

You can totally do this, dickasso. Simply hold down the middle button on a track or album name to have that track or album added to an On-the-Go playlist.
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:15 PM on January 11, 2006

Good question, and I've actually thought about this before!
-I would want the option to have more than active one on-the-go playlist, and also the option to move the tracks around in there (somehow I feel that the latter should already be possible, but if it is I don't know how)
-And I want to be able to have a "various artists" category within "artists", where you can manually move those artists of which you only have one or two tracks (or embarrassing artists), so they don't show up in the list of all artists and you don't have to scroll past them while looking for more important things.
posted by easternblot at 3:02 PM on January 11, 2006

I have an Archos Gmini 402 and as far I'm concerned, it's as perfect as an mp3/media device could be. The ONLY thing I would ask for is more space ( but then I could have spent more and got a model with more space, so that's my fault).

It's got a 20g drive, connects via usb 1 or 2. Battery lasts 10 hours playing music, and long enough to watch a movie, maybe two - depending on how much work it has to do to decode the movie.

The super fun part? It comes with a cable that plugs directly in the RCA input jacks on most modern TVs. So, you put your movie on it, go to a friends house and plug into their TV to watch your portable movie. It only seems to play divx avi files, but that's ok with me. It comes with the tools required to convert stuff, should you need to.

Upon pluggin in, it mounts just like a hard drive, and I can put my data on it anywhere and anyhow that I choose. The only caveat being that mp3s must be somewhere under the root "music" directory and movies must be under the root level "movies" directory.

It's small but sturdy, the interface is complex, but not complicated. It has a number of playback options (shuffle these, shuffle all, play everything in the folder you pick in order, etc...) and making playlists ON THE DEVICE is NOT a pain in the ass.

Oh, it will record audio too, though I haven't tried that part.
posted by jaded at 4:38 PM on January 11, 2006

Lots of good points here.

What I want they still refuse to properly make. I want a durable, customizable PDA/Phone/MP3 player/Picture viewer/Video player/radio/GPS map/Portable drive/camera/flashlight megacombo that fits in the space of, say, a Palm Pilot III. No, the Treo doesn't count. That thing is craptastic and hobbled.

It should absolutely *not* be crippled junk. I should be able to do VoIP, and be able to seamlessly hand a WiFi VoIP call off to the cell network. Record quality audio from line in or stereo mic - not just crappy 8 bit voice clips. It should be able to record from any source - phone, wifi stream, line, mic, radio, whatever. Act as a portable USB host for backups. Run real software - and be able to have that software talk to each other and all I/O. Strong cell/WiFi/WAN connectivity and I/O. Customizable UI and a choice of operating systems. AM/FM receiver built in, with FM broadcast out for use with cars and boomboxes. Let it use real batteries as easily as it does a rechargable pack. More, damnit, more! In less space! More!

I'm a total gadget slut. But even I'm getting weary of carrying 3-5 devices around to get my sick kicks. They could so easily put all this functionality into one pocket sized box these days if "they" stopped being filthy, moneygrubbing whores and actually started playing nice together.

Anyways. I almost bought a Nano or Shuffle last week. Then I actually listened to some of them with my good headphones, and realized it was utter crap. iPods sound like total ass. No wonder people are getting hearing damage. Crank that badly decoded, overmodulated sound right up so you can kind of hear it, yo! Sounds great!! What!?

I bought a $25 MP3 CD player instead. Sounds quite excellent - compared to the iPods I've heard - but not quite as good as my decent 5.1 soundcard at home. But plenty crisp and loud, even with my good 'phones. It even handles my high bitrate VBR mp3s, no sweat. Runs off of real AA batteries, which my cameras use, and my GPS, and more. Plus it can play a regular CD, standalone. And CD-Rs are dirt cheap. If I'm out and about, I can just hand someone one of my CD-Rs to share the love, rather than hope they have an iPod and a direct-connect cable, or a computer and a dock and all that. Just give 'em the CD, burn another when I get home.
posted by loquacious at 4:43 PM on January 11, 2006

twiggy: my pet peeve with battery life is this...Im a forgetful person...i don't want to forget to charge my player one day, and then run out in the middle of the next day...or just not have music period. I had an MD that had close to 100+ hrs of batter life. I brought the player on my trip to japan. I used it every single day of the week there, and on the plane ride there and back. I didn't have to worry about bringing yet another charger. I picked up a new MD that only had roughly 18hrs. I immediately dropped it in favor of the X5L which has 35 hours. I don't want to worry about having to remember to recharge my player...just a pet peeve of mine i guess.
posted by xospecialk at 6:29 PM on January 11, 2006

Hold the phone....
posted by LarryC at 7:31 PM on January 11, 2006

And on Macs, it's easy to use the iPod as an external hard drive. I don't know why they don't allow that on Windows.

Why on earth doesn't the Ipod come with FM? Or work as a mass storage device? I just bought an iAudio X5 for just these reasons.

Am I missing something? I have an ipod and a PC and it works just fine as an external storage device, thanks very much. In fact, that's the main reason I bought the thing, well, half the reason.
posted by zardoz at 7:31 PM on January 11, 2006

I'd really like the ability to have multiple genres for artists. Right now the genres are pretty much useless to me because they're either too broad or too narrow. Why can't a song/artist be Bluegrass AND Electronica, or Indie Pop AND Psychedelic Rock? That way I can get more than one band, but less than half of them when I want to listen to a certain kind of music.
posted by JackarypQQ at 7:57 PM on January 11, 2006

Add: Ogg decoding. FLAC decoding. Ruggedization. Removable battery.

Seriously think about adding: Support for filesystems other than VFAT. Bluetooth file exchange. A user interface to copy files between devices using Bluetooth file exchange (or a jumper cable a la USBOTG). Bluetooth A2DP and AVRCP profiles for stereo headset support. Multichannel digital audio out. Hot swappable battery.

Remove: The "library" concept, iTunes integration. Reliance on a big funky database of metadata. Any hard requirement for anything beyond plain old USB Storage.

Do not under any circumstances add: Phone. AM/FM Radio. Camera. A textual input interface. Voice recording. Paging. SMS. Cellular data. WiFi. Extraneous features not related to file storage and media playback.

I won't be angry if you add: WMA. Video. A copy of MAME with some Tempest ROMs to go with your circular input device. Glue to sync the photo browser to Flickr.

I won't be angry if you remove: AAC decoding. "Apple Lossless" decoding. DRM support. Video. Photo browsing.
posted by majick at 10:47 PM on January 11, 2006

You can totally do this, dickasso. Simply hold down the middle button on a track or album name to have that track or album added to an On-the-Go playlist.

Really?! Holy crap. Then why have none of my ipod owning friends been able to show me that functionality, and indeed reacted with some interest when shown that my old Zen can do it? Could it be that nobody really knows how to use Apple's "intuitive" interface? I will have to investigate.

As far as battery life goes, I just don't like connecting it to things - whether it's a computer or the wall (especially a computer, and I know the minis didn't even come with an AC adapter - no idea about the nanos and bigger ipods these days). Also, that's an optimistic figure with a new battery - I still want it to retain a reasonable charge a year after I buy it.

But yeah, I'm going to have a play with this on-the-go thingy and if it really does do that I'll stick the black 60gb on my shopping list. (Thanks!)
posted by dickasso at 12:47 AM on January 12, 2006

what do i want added to the ipod?

i would love it if when they fuck up a feature like dynamic smart playlists in a firmware update, it wouldn't take them 6 months and 5 firmware updates to decide to fix the problem.

and yes, the newest firmware released yesterday has finally fixed the issue.

vent over.



...i really didn't add anything did i? i'll go for the FM tuner also.
posted by a. at 1:48 AM on January 12, 2006

An on off switch. And let me break free of itunes - I hate that thing.
posted by heartquake at 6:45 AM on January 12, 2006

Larryc, but I want an FM Tuner to come as part of the package, not cost half what it would cost me to just buy an iriver.
posted by drezdn at 8:13 AM on January 12, 2006

I have an ipod and a PC and it works just fine as an external storage device, thanks very much. In fact, that's the main reason I bought the thing, well, half the reason.

Same here! I've had to transfer files on several professor's computers, and they're always blown away when I drag files from my ipod. "I didn't know they could do that! Aren't those for music?"
If the ipod is formatted for PC, you can use it as external drive on both PC and Mac. It's perfect!
posted by easternblot at 8:54 AM on January 12, 2006

There is an iPod plugin for Winamp, if anyone is interested. I haven't used it because my wife is comfortable with iTunes and not so much with Winamp.

One last feature I forgot to add - and would like to see - if I set up a playlist and tell iTunes to shuffle the songs, any new music added to the playlist should be integrated into the shuffle.

For example I have an '80's music' playlist, shuffled (standard, not smart, so I can manually remove shitty 80's pop but keep the cool stuff). I buy a Clash album, import it to iTunes and add it to the 80's list. iTunes dutifully adds it to the end of the playlist, with the entire album in order. WTF? I have to set the playlist to unshuffle, then back to shuffle, to get newly added songs into the mix. This doesn't seem right to me.
posted by caution live frogs at 9:56 AM on January 12, 2006

easternpop: i think the gripe is that you can't drag and drop your music files onto the ipod, and that you must use itunes, or ephpod or whatever to transfer the music onto the device. whereas with the X5, and equivalent players, getting music onto the drive is merely a drag and drop operation.
posted by xospecialk at 10:20 AM on January 12, 2006

and yes, the newest firmware released yesterday has finally fixed the issue.

holy moley that rocks! That bugged me so much!
posted by soplerfo at 12:33 PM on January 12, 2006

definatly soplerfo, after the first 3 months it made me wonder why the hell i switched from iriver to apple. i'm not sure if i will get another ipod when my current one dies.

but those macbook pros? yum!
posted by a. at 4:35 PM on January 12, 2006

I'll just give my top 3.

1. "Hyperlinks" between songs, especially in the now playing menu. Often times, a song will come up on shuffle and I'll decide I want to listen to more songs by that artist or on that album. More importantly, I don't want to have to dig and scroll through lots of lists. I'd rather push the button a 4th time (or something) and get a context menu that lets me jump to album, artist, playlist, and perhaps other metadata.

2. Easier way to turn shuffle pay on and off.

3. Voice assisted navigation. Sure, speech recognition is a challenging problem, especially on a small battery driven device, but come on, the vocabulary is tightly bounded by the names of the artists, albums, songs and a dozen or so commands. Not only that, but it is known in advance, and so a lot of preprocessing could be done by iTunes to optimize things for quick and easy lookup.

Then, when I'm trying to find Quadrophenia, I don't have to scroll through a long list of albums, or artists. I just say "Quadrophenia" and it shows me a short list of possible matches. It doesn't even have to get it perfect, just as long as the item I want is one of its 5-10 guesses that I can quickly navigate to with the scroll wheel and select with the center button.

Other things that would be nice: HQ recording support out of the box. Ability to install 3rd party apps (new games, productivity apps, etc). Speaker, even a crummy one, for sharing video clips with people.

I generally like the simplicty of the iPod, i'd like it to stay simple, or get simpler with the same basic functionality. I don't want a do-everything device..
posted by Good Brain at 6:53 PM on January 12, 2006

My number-one, will-pay-lots-if-you-do-this change:

When I go to Music>Artists, the artists are in alphabetical order. Right? So when I go to Music>Albums or Music>Songs, I want them to be in alphabetical order by albums and songs respectively. Otherwise, what's the point of having them as separate categories?

My number-two, will-be-very-happy-if-you-do-this change:

I want to be able to make more than one On-The-Go playlist without syncing in between. I'm not sure what would be the best way to do this (tap twice for On-The-Go2?). But it would definitely be nice.

I guess I'm a power user, because I know pretty much what's possible with my iPod. I mean, if I'd opened my Palm with no clue, I wouldn't've been able to do as much as I could've playing with my iPod with no clue. But there's still no substitute for actually skimming through the user manual once; it's user-friendly if you can easily remember how to do what you want.

Just to counter all the iTunes-haters above, I adore iTunes; it's the program I've been looking for all my life. I mean, okay, I'd be happier if it weren't such a resource hog. But it does whatever I want!
posted by booksandlibretti at 5:23 PM on January 13, 2006