Robert Switzer

I hate to gush about products, and especially Apple products, but the 5g iPod my wife gave me for my birthday is, well, fucking great, or Insanely Great as the Apple fanboys like to put it.

The aesthetics are flawless, of course. The only ugly products out of Apple came under the ill-fated regime of Dr. Gil who, truth be told was a bit of an ug himself. Ever since Jobs has been back, the products have been nothing if not pretty.

And it works with Linux. After initializing the thing with the iTunes software on my wife’s WinXP laptop, I plugged it into the usb port on my Fedora 4 desktop machine, mounted it right up as a vfat file system, fired up gtkpod, and I was ready to go.

I quickly uploaded about 100 CD titles from my mp3 collection, plugged the earbuds into my ears and hit shuffle.

The sound quality was pretty good — not the quality of a good set of closed headphones, of course, but decent. And at moderate volume — about half-way up — the music is loud enough to yield up a pretty good level of detail, but because of the open ear bud design ambient sounds are still audible.

So if you like an immersive listening experience, a replacement for the stock earbuds is probably in order. But if you want to use the iPod for listening while out walking or in other settings where being aware of your aural surroundings is important, the stock earbuds work pretty well.

In fact, the blend of ambient and recorded sound can be interesting. I was out walking the other day with the iPod on shuffle, as usual, and a Robert Rich track (can’t remember which one) came up. It was a beautiful spring day out, crystal clear and 68 degrees. Birds were singing. Cars were driving by as I walked, with the windows open and the radios playing. All of this blended in seamlessly with the track I was listening to, and before long the barrier between my experience of the recorded track I was listening to and the ambient sounds in the environment dissolved. Nice.

The ‘pod works pretty well in the car too, though I am far from being a picky automotive audiophile. My wife included one of those little Belkin FM transmitters with the gift, so all I had to do was plug it into the iPod, set it for 88.5, tune my car FM radio to the same station, and hit shuffle.

What you get is the best radio station in the world. Since you get to pick the universe of music, nothing will really suck. Yet, since the shuffle option is random, you don’t know what’s coming next. Some of the contextual juxtapositions that happen are surprising and delightful. And there’s no danger of having song-intros greased by an oleo-voiced asshole dj. In fact, there’s no talking at all unless you put some spoken-word or audio book files on there yourself.

On the day I got the ‘pod (my birthday) we both took the day off and hit the road for an early-spring sight-seeing auto-tour through northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite country punctuated with stops for various small-town food specialities.

The ‘pod was loaded with the entire Nick Cave major-label discog, most of the Joy Division in print, a lot of :zoviet*france:, some Tuxedomoon, Coltrane’s Ascension, some Robert Rich, John Cale, KMFDM, Alice In Chains, most of PiL, some Univers Zero, My Bloody Valentine, Kate Bush, Gang Of Four, Art Of Noise, The Rapture, and even Tom Petty’s Damn The Torpedoes, a guilty pleasure. And to top it all off, I put the whole Atlantic Rhythm and Blues collection on. As soon as I rip my black Stax box, that’s going on too.

What a great soundtrack for driving through the beauty and despair of the small towns and blasted anthracite landscape of northeastern Pennsylvania.

I finally got around to trying out the video side of the iPod 5g yesterday, and I was in for another pleasant surprise. The little 2×3 inch screen looks great. I downloaded an Apple commercial from 1977 that featured David Susskind — or Dick Cavett, I don’t remember the difference — to test things out, and it worked great.

It took me most of yesterday afternoon to work out how to encode video for use on an iPod. ffmpeg will do the trick, as long as you compile it with aac support. The format is mpeg4 video with aac audio, 320×240. For those of you who are interested in the process, here’s a good ffmpeg command line.

I encoded and uploaded a video study of mine Study One. Even though this video was designed for high-resolution projection and nearly every frame is different , the compressed version played on a ‘pod conveys quite a bit of the original. I also encoded and downloaded a great abstract film by Harry Smith ‘Court Metrage 7th Degree (cocaine)’. This also looked great though the soundtrack was in mono — not necessarily a bad thing as the soundtrack on the version I have is made up of Beatle tunes.

I had a couple of cheap imitation Walkmen back in the day, and I even bought one of the first Creative Labs mp3 players back at the end of the last century. But the iPod is something else again. A new and intriguing way to listen to music.

I contrast this with my tradition-bound listening habits. Being a 51 year old baby-boomer, I came up in the day of the 45 single, but more than that, I came of age when the LP was ascendant. Track order and pacing of the work as a whole was at least as important as the individual songs. Lifting the tone arm after the record started to spin and cherry-picking tracks was a heresy. Listening to sides was OK, maybe. But really, immersing yourself in the (capital A) artist’s complete vision — the LP — was the only acceptable way to listen.

Recently, I’ve started listening through my collection of vinyl LP’s, a collection that spans the 25 years from 1965 to 1990. I’m workng through alphabetically. One or two albums a day before/during breakfast and before I start the day’s work. This morning’s listening was ‘Only Human’ by Amon Duul II and ‘Mister Heartbreak’ by Laurie Anderson.

LP listening is different than the random-track heresy of the iPod. You do the LP ritual — pulling it out of it’s sleeve, putting it on the turntable, preparing the discwasher brush and cleaning the surface, then setting the needle into the groove of the first track and settling into a comfy chair to peruse the jacket and liner notes while the first side plays. Then, in 20 or so minutes, you get up to flip to the other side.

Yet, the iPod is better in a lot of ways, I think. As comforting as the LP ritual is, the sedentary contemplation of jacket and liner notes while listening leads to the fetish for lyrics and the persona of the creator that is the handmaiden of commodification. Listening on the go with the iPod strips all that away. The intended context is gone, there’s no artifact to finger and nothing to read. So all you’re left with is the pure experience of the music in the moment, as if that isn’t enough.

So Apple has a hit with the iPod, though everyone but me knew that a long time ago. My love-hate relationship with Apple swings back to love, at least for a while. But more on that later.

Playing right now: Nick Cave’s ‘Stagger Lee’