Probably the most significant recent development in recorded music has been the arrival of the MP3 player in 1998, of which the most widely used is the Apple iPod, introduced in 2001. For the uninitiated, an iPod is a hard disk in a stylish casing that will fit comfortably in your pocket, yet which has sufficient capacity to hold your entire collection of CDs and then some. You can download music to your iPod from your CDs using the CD burner on your PC, and you can also download music from iTunes, which currently costs £0.79 per song.
An iPod is like a tiny portable jukebox but with a huge selection of music. You can create your own playlists or let the machine pick songs at random (the iPod “shuffle”). There is even some recent software, named Genius, which creates playlists for you from music in your collection.
I bought my iPod in early 2005; it is the 20 gigabyte click wheel version and is said to hold in excess of 5000 songs. I have always thought that it would be more helpful if Apple measured capacity by time rather than by the number of “songs”; the latter can vary considerably in length and, more significantly, are not the appropriate method to apply to classical music. A movement from a symphony can easily be six times as long as a pop song. I have not yet filled up the disk on my iPod but it is apparent that, if I were limiting the music to pop & rock, it would hold comfortably in excess of 5,000 songs. Perhaps of more relevance is my calculation that, if full, the iPod would hold almost 338 hours of music.
Since 2005, iPods have moved on at a rapid rate. The new iPod Classic has an enormous 120GB of storage which can apparently hold up to 30,000 songs, 25,000 photos or 150 hours of video.
There are two aspects of my iPod which have been somewhat unsatisfactory. The first is that the battery needs to be recharged too often for my liking. It is supposed to last for 12 hours when fully charged but, although I have not timed it, I am sure it does not last for anything like that time. Secondly, I find the earphones uncomfortable after about an hour of use and their sound quality could be a lot better. Having said that, I understand that the batteries in the more recent models last for considerably longer than the older versions and the headphones problem is easily solved by buying a decent set.
In any event, you do not always have to listen through headphones. Your iTunes library will be stored on the hard disk of your PC or Mac so you can listen through speakers connected to your computer. There are also compact portable speaker systems available into which you can plug your iPod, some of which are of very high quality.
Post revised: 12 November 2008
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