iPod shuffle shakes up music habits
BY JOSEPH P. KAHN
BOSTON GLOBE
"Just take those old records off the shelf, I sit and listen to 'em by myself," Bob Seger sings in "Old Time Rock and Roll," a staple of classic-rock radio. If today's music doesn't have the same soul, as Seger laments, it surely comes packed inside a remarkable new listening tool, one that is keeping more and more of those old records, and CDs, on a lot of shelves these days.
Most conspicuous among the tools of this burgeoning revolution is the Apple-made iPod, a compact, lightweight digital-music player with a king-size capability to store, index, and play tunes at the flick of a wheel or the tap of a button. Introduced in 2001, the iPod is not the only MP3 player on the market, but it is the most popular and versatile of the bunch, offering prodigious amounts of computing power in a highly portable container.
Its popularity has soared since the past holiday season; when the newest model, the iPod mini, debuted in February, 100,000 preorders were already booked. This forced the company to delay a worldwide rollout planned for this month.
The iPod is also a rare crossover hit for Apple, since the company offers the iTunes software for both Mac and Windows.
PORTABLE JUKEBOXES
Even more wondrous than its sophisticated technology, though, is how the iPods and their ilk are changing the way music is being experienced, or re-experienced, by all sorts of audiophiles in all sorts of settings, from health clubs and school cafeterias to malls and subway cars.
In essence, these devices function much like customized jukeboxes or personalized radio stations, but don't require a pocketful of coins to feed them or noisy advertisements to support them. "All my music, all the time -- and all in my pocket" might be their operating mantra.
When thousands of titles are transferred onto the machine's hard drive and in rotation, users say, what happens on the listening end can be aesthetically stimulating, even liberating. This is not necessarily because the tracks are unfamiliar, but because the software's shuffle-play capability juxtaposes them in intriguing ways, not only across an entire 5,000-track collection but within, say, a compilation of blues tunes or Broadway melodies, or even shuffling through only the tracks played in the past 90 days.
In many cases, such specialized playlists can be automatically expanded by iTunes, the companion software that is another vital component of iPod chic. Want to create a continually updated playlist of every song on your iPod that was released during your college years? The machine can be programmed to do that, too.
CDS AS BACKUPS
Users can now stow away their albums and CDs as backup files while hauling their collections wherever they go. These tiny music boxes and their distinctive, earbud-style headphones have become life-transforming accessories: the keys to a musical magic kingdom where hundreds of favorite tunes, from Rachmaninov to Ricky Skaggs, can happily share space and be retrieved almost instantly.
One devotee is New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross. Writing in the magazine a few weeks ago, Ross, 36, marveled at the way his machine "goes crashing through barriers of style in ways that change how I listen" when programmed to skip randomly from one track to another. His breakthrough moment, Ross says in a recent telephone interview, occurred when the shuffle mode on his iPod took him from a recording of Igor Stravinksy's "Rites of Spring" to Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues," an unexpected yet inspired musical transition that "was exactly in synch with what I'd been thinking about," he says.
"For me, it's all about the mix," says Ross, who got his iPod two years ago. "All these different types of music coexisting in ways they haven't before."
With as much as 40 gigabytes of memory (equivalent to what a powerhouse desktop computer offered just a few years ago), some iPods have enough room to absorb a complete, bookcase-size collection of music -- 10,000 songs or more, stored on a device scarcely bigger than a deck of playing cards. Another hallmark is the device's ability to transfer tracks from a computer at lightning speed, thanks to FireWire, the Apple-devised standard for high-speed data transfer.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
To youth-market researcher Max Valiquette, this combination of smallness and technological muscle is part of an accelerating cultural shift away from home-based entertainment toward a brave new world of portability, allowing consumers vastly greater control over what they listen to and view.
"One, you don't have to wait for what you want to hear," says Valiquette, 30, an iPod user and president of Youthography, a research firm based in Toronto. "Two, it's not the volume of songs but the navigation -- by mood, genre, popularity, artist, et cetera -- that's the real genius here."
