Apple introduces 3rd gen iPod Shuffle

[Hana]

Overview, page with samples of the different language voices



It speaks:



- Chinese (Mandarin)

- Czech

- Dutch

- English

- French

- German

- Greek

- Italian

- Japanese

- Polish

- Portuguese

- Spanish

- Swedish

- Turkish



I can't tell with anything other than English & Japanese, but it seems like it does a pretty good job with those two, at least. I'm a little on the fence because of the headphone issue (you have to use the Apple earbuds because that's where the controls are, which sucks because their earbuds have NEVER fit me well), but otherwise I like the sound of it.

[Geof]

Yeah, it's pretty insane how a 4gb flash player can be thinner and smaller than their previous 2gb Shuffle. Although I kinda question the need for it to tell you the artist & title of the songs that YOU put on there, it's still a pretty spiffy feature. I got a 4G Nano a couple months ago & was using the 2G Shuffle before that (mom loaned me hers when she got an 80gb Classic) and I was surprised by how good it sounded even without any EQ options. From the unboxing article at iLounge, the 3G Shuffle seems to have significantly improved sound over the 2G, and it supports Playlists as well. Having the controls in the earphone cord IS a pain though, since I've never felt Apple's phones had low enough bass frequency. But someone'll make one that you can plug any earphones into eventually. Overall, 4gb for $80 is a pretty good deal, even if you can get other players with video & 1/2 that capacity for around the same price. I can't wait to see what Apple comes up with this fall!

[neshcom]

Wait, this comes with the headphones that have the touch controls? That's kinda neat. I know they were offering it separately for other iPods, but being dependent on it is a little chinsey



Anyone think it looks like a mini iBox? Seriously, no on device controls?

[vanillacat]

I could never buy smaller than like, 60GB (I have too much music!), but I would never buy this because... I've never liked the robot computer voices, they're quite creepy to me.



Additionally, the language thing irks me. What if (and I do) have music in Korean? Romanian? Russian? Would it default to English? Would it not say the name at all? I don't want to hear things butchered by a robot voice, and there's a lot of different non-Roman characters that it might not be able to read. It can't possibly know everything, and let's say I put my real name in as the artist information, which is often mispronounced. Imagine every substitute teacher you've ever had that butchered your name when calling out role, but in a creepy robot voice. <img src='http://mm-bbs.org/public/style_emoticon ... hatthe.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />



I guess I don't HAVE to use the VoiceOver, but I think a lot of people are thinking the way I am. It kind of interrupts the flow of the music, doesn't it?

[surasshu]

It doesn't talk. It records your Apple talking, stuffing his already miniscule memory with useless bullshit.



Additionally, you have to listen to it with the horrible Apple headphones, making it useless for anybody with ears.

[Ap2000]

The japanese sounds somewhat weird.

However, the german is quite good (from the pronounciation), too bad I strongly dislike apple and it's over-priced products. (yeah, call me hate machine already =P)



[quote name='neshcom' post='62187' date='Mar 13 2009, 05:40 PM']Wait, this comes with the headphones that have the touch controls? That's kinda neat. I know they were offering it separately for other iPods, but being dependent on it is a little chinsey



Anyone think it looks like a mini iBox? Seriously, no on device controls?[/quote]



"I've done Nintendo."

Oh the times when consoles were all just called Nintendo, no matter if it actually was Nintendo and wether it was the SNES or NES...

[Geof]

[quote name='Ap2000' post='62261' date='Mar 14 2009, 03:26 PM']The japanese sounds somewhat weird.

However, the german is quite good (from the pronounciation), too bad I strongly dislike apple and it's over-priced products. (yeah, call me hate machine already =P)



[quote name='neshcom' post='62187' date='Mar 13 2009, 05:40 PM']Wait, this comes with the headphones that have the touch controls? That's kinda neat. I know they were offering it separately for other iPods, but being dependent on it is a little chinsey



Anyone think it looks like a mini iBox? Seriously, no on device controls?[/quote]



"I've done Nintendo."

Oh the times when consoles were all just called Nintendo, no matter if it actually was Nintendo and wether it was the SNES or NES...

[/quote]

That's true today of iPod.



I think some of you are reacting to this in kind of a weird way. It's an eighty dollar iPod SHUFFLE. It's meant for people who just want to have some music while they jog & don't care about listening to full albums. The voice aspect is just a cool extra feature, and it's something the listener has control over. I do agree that having the controls (FYI, it's just PLAY, PAUSE, NEXT & BACK) integrated into the earphone cord means you have to use Apple's earphones, but (a) you know someone'll make an adapter or something that'll let you use your preferred kind, and (<img src='http://mm-bbs.org/public/style_emoticon ... >/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' /> 99% of the people who'll buy this don't really care about audiophile quality anyway. It's a product aimed at a specific demographic & I guarantee it'll do better than any other product similarly designed.

[pamacii]

[quote name='Geof' post='62270' date='Mar 14 2009, 10:04 PM']I think some of you are reacting to this in kind of a weird way. It's an eighty dollar iPod SHUFFLE.[/quote]I think that is my major problem. My current "super portable" mp3 player is a sansa clip that cost me maybe twenty five dollars delivered. I think that this new generation of hardware is trying to hard to get users to re-buy the things that they already have by adding gimmicky features. My sansa is only about 1 inch by 2 inches, and it still has a screen and a FM tuner. Both of which I find very useful. Then again, what do I know. I have never owned an iPod.

[vanillacat]

[quote name='Pamacii' post='62378' date='Mar 16 2009, 09:52 AM']My sansa is only about 1 inch by 2 inches, and it still has a screen and a FM tuner. Both of which I find very useful. Then again, what do I know. I have never owned an iPod.[/quote]



I'd like to butt in and point out that my Creative Zen mp3 player had a number of features that are FAR more useful than a talking iPod, such as the ability to change the background of your mp3 player, some other basic color customization options, an FM tuner, and a recording feature. This was 2006, maybe 2007.



WHY THE FUCK HASN'T APPLE FIGURED THIS OUT YET?

Is it because if you give people a radio, they'll use the radio to listen to their songs instead of spending .99 to buy songs from Apple?

Likewise, if you give people a recording device, people will just record the radio and not pay money for the songs? (btw, you couldn't record the radio WITHIN my Zen at the same time as the recorder, but you could record an external radio if you so desired)

If you let people customize their iPods, will it "destroy" the trademark sterile white palette that Apple is so famous for at this point? I DON'T GET IT. THESE ARE SIMPLE, SIMPLE THINGS, APPLE. Fuck your little talking robot voice, fuck it to high hell.



And don't even get me started about the time last year that I bought a Zune and found out that night that it didn't support foreign characters. <img src='http://mm-bbs.org/public/style_emoticon ... #>/doh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':(' /> I promptly returned that bitch.

[sadude]

What are you going on about? <img src='http://mm-bbs.org/public/style_emoticon ... /laugh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':(' /> Features, features, features.

[quote name='vanillacat' post='62440' date='Mar 17 2009, 10:27 PM']such as the ability to change the background of your mp3 player[/quote]

You can do that on the iPod Touch, since that works like a wallpaper.

[quote name='vanillacat' post='62440' date='Mar 17 2009, 10:27 PM']an FM tuner[/quote]

You can do that on the iPod classic and on the nano with the radio remote that they sell. And on the iPod Touch and iPhone, there are dozens of apps that do streaming radio, like Pandora, AOL radio, last.fm, one from ClearChannel for a bunch of their stations, etc.

[quote name='vanillacat' post='62440' date='Mar 17 2009, 10:27 PM']and a recording feature. This was 2006, maybe 2007.[/quote]

Iriver had this in freaking 2003, so it's nothing new. *shrug* Most people don't seem to want that. I had it in my iriver H140, but I never used it.

[quote name='vanillacat' post='62440' date='Mar 17 2009, 10:27 PM']WHY THE FUCK HASN'T APPLE FIGURED THIS OUT YET?[/quote]

They, have, and they've gone with the options that would let them sell the most and earn the most profit. Part of the appeal of Apple (once you peel back all the marketing! <img src='http://mm-bbs.org/public/style_emoticon ... ohyeah.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' /> ) is the alleged simplicity and elegance <img src='http://mm-bbs.org/public/style_emoticon ... >/sick.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':(' /> of their user interfaces and hardware. Instead of going with feature creep and adding in everything plus the kitchen sink to their products, they pick out a few things and decide to implement them (relatively) well. I consider myself a tech geek and am generally annoyed by this approach, but I got an iPod because it had the best battery life and the highest capacity at the time. The capacity and the battery life suck on the touchy screeny dealies, but to me the apps and other features make up for it.

[BeForJess]

I used to buy the other brands for MP3 players, too. I talked shit about iPods all the time - I didn't like that you had to use their software, or how overpriced they were, or the way they were marketed to be the cool trendy thing to have. and yet, now I am a loyal iPod user. What turned me?



First there was my Rio... OK, but clunky. Ultimately my car was broken into and it was stolen. I had the interface set to japanese though, so hopefully someone was really disappointed with it. I wasn't too big on it anyway.



Then I had a shitty tiny Sansa... just wasn't worth my time, in the end, it was hard to work. I upgraded to a 'nice' 8gb Sansa when I got rid of that. It came highly recommended by a lot of people, but I had problem after problem with it from day 1. The program it came with was a total pain in the ass, but hey, I could bypass that, right? Well, I did, but then I had a whole other set of problems. After putting new songs on there, all the sudden half my files became corrupt. Ran virus checkers and whatnot, couldn't find any problems. Wiped the whole thing clean only to have the problem return a month later. Just too much trouble to deal with. Also, I was out of room on it with only 1/3 of my library on it anyway.



I finally decided that with the large storage capacity and some features that i only wished my other players had (lyrics display, kana/kanji/hanzi/hangul support, etc) to just suck it up and get an iPod classic. And I'm never going back again.



There is only one problem that is mildly irritating... For some reason, some artists pop up when I sort by artist 2 or 3 times, each instance having the same exact songs listed, so it's not a spelling or spacing problem. In iTunes, it's perfect but for some reason on the pod it lists BeForU twice and 小坂りゆthree times. Maybe a patch in the future will fix it though.



The biggest pain in the ass though is that I have to redo the info for everything I had, since i had players in the past that couldn't read anything in asian languages I romanized all the artists and song titles so they would display. But I really hate that, so now that i can display it correctly I have to go change it back. Grr.

[Geof]

[quote name='BeForJess' post='62641' date='Mar 22 2009, 05:32 AM']There is only one problem that is mildly irritating... For some reason, some artists pop up when I sort by artist 2 or 3 times, each instance having the same exact songs listed, so it's not a spelling or spacing problem. In iTunes, it's perfect but for some reason on the pod it lists BeForU twice and 小坂りゆthree times. Maybe a patch in the future will fix it though.[/quote]

The most likely reason for multiple artist listings is that there's some tiny difference like a space at the end of the characters in one listing. Even if you're not sure or can't find the difference, it's easy to fix. Just copy the artist name from one song, then select all the songs by that artist, choose Get Info, then paste that into the artist box & hit OK so they'll all have an identical artist name.



-OR-



You could also actually HAVE those files on your iPod 2 or 3 times. I can't seem to find the option right now, but I do remember getting a prompt from iTunes asking if I really wanted to send a duplicate of a song when I'd try to send an album to my iPod & already had a song from it on there. It might be a model-specific option (different options are available for a Shuffle than for a Classic, for example.) I can never even accidentally send a duplicate to my 4G Nano.

[sadude]

[quote name='BeForJess' post='62641' date='Mar 22 2009, 08:32 AM']There is only one problem that is mildly irritating... For some reason, some artists pop up when I sort by artist 2 or 3 times, each instance having the same exact songs listed, so it's not a spelling or spacing problem. In iTunes, it's perfect but for some reason on the pod it lists BeForU twice and 小坂りゆthree times. Maybe a patch in the future will fix it though.[/quote]

I used to get that, too. It only happened sometimes, and resynching it made it go away. Maybe it was a cable problem? It also went away after I upgraded the firmware to the latest one, so check that as well. It wasn't notifying me of latest firmwares because I originally set it up as FAT32 on a Windows computer, and for some reason iTunes on OS X doesn't update those.



Also, make sure to check the Album Artist info as well as all of the sorting options. Go through each field to make sure that there isn't even a blank space in them, since that throws it off sometimes. And lastly, go into the Music listing in iTunes and bring up the browser (View -> Show Browser), and see if the artists are listed multiple times there. If they are, compare the songs and see what the difference is, or copy the artist field from one set to the others.