To iPod or not to iPod?

Right, the unofficial iPod review. This will cover all your questions and some other things you might want to know. The answer will all be re-iterations of other people answer and a review will follow.

- When unprotected .MP3 music is put on to an iPod, can it be played on different machines (during the day at work, and then later at home)?

As mentioned by both Daemonguy and o[tter], this cannot be done with the default software [iTunes] This can however, be done [as o[tter] mentioned with the winamp plugin. Now since you love winamp, this will not be a problem. Another way, is simply to enable the iPod for disk use, browse to the ipod music folder, and then enable the showing of the hidden files. Instructions can be found here for a mac and of course windows.

- If I place my .MP3 files on to an iPod, can I copy them off onto my work machine? If so, what do I need to do so? (two "docks," one for home and one for work?)

Yes. Using the method above, you could. All you would really need is the firewire\usb cable that came with the iPod. However. Daemonguy was right. Without using the method mentioned above, you would not be able to do this. The docks are un-necessary and all they do is offer the ability to charge\sync your iPod standing up. A useful little feature of the dock however, is the ability to use it's built in 3.5mm jack to plug in speakers either at work or at a different computer almost eliminating the need to transfer the music onto said [other] computer.

- When the iPod is connected to my machine(s), does it show up as a hard drive or do I have to install and use Apple software to get to it?

Yes, this can be done by enabling disk use. This would have to be done to access your music on another computer so chances are it you would have done it already anyways. As well, as Daemonguy said, many other programs such as Anapod Explorer can do this as well.

- Can I use winamp to play the songs (when connected to a PC)?

Like o[tter] said, This can be done with Winamp. If the iPod is connected to the computer, you would be able to play the songs on the computer [provided you have the Winamp plugin]. This can also be done on Anapod explorer. In fact, both products they offer [the one for the iPod and the dell dj allow you to do this.

- Does anyone sync the iPod calendar app with Outlook? Thoughts?

I do\would if I could. Bloody thing is so hard for me to do. See, it only reads .vcf files on the iPod, but the palm manager that I use is only capable for some reason of exporting one .vcf at a time. having over 100, this would become tedious. I looked into Outpod but that required me to first export to Outlook and that never happened because the .cba file that Outpod would import from Outlook, wasn't coming properly. In the end I just gave up and said, I'll deal with my screwy palm instead.

You also mentioned some other things such as having 18+ gigs of music, only a cassette/am/fm player, and battery requirements. To answer the first issue, when you first get the ipod [20 gig fourth generation] you have 18 usable gigs. This would be fine for you, as long as you dont rip those extra 50 cd's. Moving onto the next issue. As o[tter] mentioned, the am/fm adapter is not to be trusted [i have no personal experience with one] and reccommends the cassette adapter. While i havent used this as well, i have read and heard from my friends that it is the perfect addition to an iPod and to look into acquiring one. The issue of battery life will be adressed later.

Since I don't have and iPod photo, I cannot comment on its abilities at all.


Right, onto the review now.

Setup
This product follows the "use right out of the box" principle of all other mac's. I opened the FEDEX box, i removed the wrapping [frantically] and then found the Ipod box. I took the inner box out of its shell and opened it up. it was like a book, very easy to read..i mean open. [lame laugh] I removed the ipod and turned it on. The instructions say to first charge the iPod and then use it, however, my father a very life-experienced man told me that if the battery has a charge and then you charge it till its full, it will decrease total battery life. This has become apparent with the constant charging of my cordless phone. So, after hearing about that, i decided, OK, im going to load my songs on, all 1500 of them. This takes me into the next part of the review.

Song Transfer

This was the simplest thing ive ever done. After installing the software included on the iPod cd [drivers and such] it was immediately recognized in iTunes. After a little bit of registration, i got onto transferring. Within 20 minutes, the first 1000 songs were done, and after that, it was only around 5 minutes for the rest. This was happening as some of my music was being re-encoded in iTunes. I finished syncing and voila, i was off...walking the dog . My song tags transferred perfectly as i had re-done them all in iTunes during the last few days.
I reccommend using the USB transfer cable for the transferring of songs on a full battery. I say this because it is USB 2.0 meaning 480 mbit/s transfer rate vs. the 400mbit/s transfer rate of firewire. Use firewire only if your iPod is dead. [it will unnecessarily charge it otherwise]

Sound Quality

The sound quality is somethng to be afraid of. [in a good way] I was using my sony street style [something or the ohter] wraparound headphones while playing the music. Let me give you a comparison. using my old dell compared to this is like listening to a cat sing the star spangled banner, over hearing it at a baseball game sung by someone like...i don't know...mariah carey. [not saying she's good, but offering comparison...some may same the quality is close]
When using the equalizers, it is the same situation. excellent sound coming out of that machine, even using the default ipod earphones. This is something i cannot say about the dell. even the latest model is plagued by bad sound quality. In fact, over the years, it ahs moved from iPod contender to "something to tote your music around on" Using an equalizer on the dell dj meant pulling out hair. The sample used for the determination was a 1411 kbps audio file played on full volume with a range of equalizers. Another sample was used that was 32 kbps audio file resulted in somewhat dimished sound, however taht is to be expected as it too was played full blast and with a range of equalizers.

Battery Life

Battery life, no matter what anyone says [including apple] is great. I recently made a 12+ hour trip from austin, texas to toronto, ontario. Now normally this wouldnt be a 12 hour trip, but one our flights was over booked and we got another one [as well as travel vouchers ] so all in all, i had a very long trip. The iPod was playing all this time througha variety of songs with quality ranging no lower than 192 kbps all the way up to 1411 kbps, with a variety of file types including wav, mp3, aac, and aiff. this use was also sprinkled with the occasional use of games [solitaire! [so lonely lol] and brick, and of course parachute [cant stand music quiz] ]
As mentioned before, this included the playing of very large files sometimes up to 60 and 80 megs in total size. This means the spinning of the hard drive to cache only nine megs of the song quite often. battery life was great and held up to all the torture i threw at it. mind you, it got a nice good charge when i got home, poor thing wouldnt even turn on.

Using the iPod

This for some can be easy, or it can be hard. The click wheel is either a burden or a blessing to you. I find it very easy to use and the clicking it makes when you move it [off, speaker, headphones, both] is a great replacement for actual tactile feedback. [one of the criticisms of the ipod is the lack of feed back when using the click wheel] The user interface is very easy to navigate through, accessing all the features such as the alarm, clock, contacts, and datebook were all easy for me to do as well as my mother, so that indicates a very easy learning curve .

In conclusion, this is a much better piece of equipment than the dell excrement i was using earlier. I havent used an iriver, nor do i plan on. However, my uncle recently acquired one for $300. I cannot remember the storage space, but it displayed photos, recieved fm transmissions, and had a voice recorder [i think]. his initial use revealed that it was a relatively poorly built mp3 player and his 6 year old creative HDD based mp3 player worked much better than it.

another issue to consider when debating between iPod or other MP3 player is the ammount of accessories available.

becasue the iPod has such a large market share right now, there are a TON of accessories available for it (portable speakers, cases, cables, other do-dads). There's not nearly as many available for the other HDD MP3 players simply because there's not enough people out there to warrant producing specialty products for a Dell DJ or a Creative product.

You can do some pretty cool things with your iPod with all the extra toys that are available for it. I mean, they even make a car to go with your iPod for goodness sakes!