The agony and the ecstacy of the iPod Shuffle: your life in 512 MB or less
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After:
I’d like to take this opportunity to pour a 40 on the ground for my first-generation 512 MB iPod Shuffle. I replaced it yesterday with a blue 1 GB iPod Shuffle, one of the new models with the built-in clip, and I adore both the aesthetics and the increased capacity of the new model already (though it remains to be seen if it’ll be more or less roadworthy than the v1 Shuffle was), but at the same time, trading up is kind of like the end of a micro-era for me, and the original iPod shuffle definitely left an impact on my life that I’ll not soon forget.
It’s not that I was attached to the particular device I owned (it was actually my third iPod Shuffle; thankfully, Best Buy’s replacement plan worked wonders in this department, because v1 Shuffles were particularly susceptible to damage and wear), but there was and is a lifestyle that goes along with having one of the little buggers. Some of you might not actually put a lot of thought into what goes on your Shuffles, but for the rest of us (or at least me), owning a Shuffle was a never-ending, obsessive-compulsive battle to encapsulate the soundtrack of your entire life, up-to-the-minute, in the space of about 120 songs or less. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to mix tape or mix CD culture since the size of my music collection and the ready availability of most music made sharing tapes and CDs a somewhat obsolete exercise. I fully expect to catch hell for saying that about mixes, but honestly, if I can help it, I almost never make mix CDs for people anymore; why give someone 18 songs, no matter how thoughtful an exercise it may be, when for virtually the same price you can give someone a data DVD with 440 (completely legal, honestly purchased…yeah, that’s it!) songs on it?
With a 512 v1 Shuffle, if you had a significantly-sized music library, your mission, if you chose to accept it, was to assemble this tapestry of what your world sounded like: old favorites you never get tired of, recent tracks that’d just fallen into your lap, that new album you want to get familiar with, and of course, the oddball stuff like my sound file of Brad from “Bachelor Party” crying about how he killed a mule. This process sometimes would take hours (and even with the 1 GB model, I predict it still will at times), especially when you use the Shuffle-specific “reduce sound files to 128kb AAC” functionality to fit extra music on it, and it’s been a maddening process at times. It was a huge pain in the ass, but at those times when you really nail it, it’s awesome. You feel like the baddest motherfucker on Earth when you have this thing running for a few hours and nothing throws you off your game. It’s like being Superman, Jesus Christ and Hit…ok, not quite that good, but it’s good, and it made the Shuffle worth owning and worth suffering through equipment failures for. Hopefully, again, the new Shuffles aren’t as fragile as the v1s were, but I’ll still miss the tempramental little fucker that was the v1, because it was small and cool and enabled me to play bad songs by The Darkness at high volumes without having to carry very much with me for the first time in the history of portable devices. No tapes, no CDs, no big clunky piece of shit things. Just one little clunky piece of shit thing. God bless it. So long, fucker.