Say Goodbye to the iPod Classic

If anyone is interested, Aeroplan still has the Classic available (slightly reduced point value) although they are saying "limited quantities"... For members of other loyalty programs, it might be worth checking into.

They have one less now, I just ordered one for backup. I figure that since our family has 4 of them on the go, it's just a question of when one of us is going to need one.

 

Oh yeah, that would have gone over well...

I don't get the love (or, in fact, any love) for Micro USB. The connectors are difficult to use and fragile. I'm delighted Apple didn't switch to Micro USB but instead came up with a vastly-superior connector that (brace yourselves!) just works.

 

I will be the first to concede (although I have no devices with it), that the reversible nature of the Lightning connector makes it superior to Micro USB, Mini USB and regular USB. Apple could have licensed it and Lightning would now be the standard for all devices - portable hard drives, cameras, printers etc. Nope.

So soon we will have USB Type C: a reversible connector which will compatible with USB 3.1 an incoming standard with twice the throughput of USB 3 (10 GB per second versus 5 GB) and the ability to supply up to 100 watts. Another cable to search for in the cable drawer.

 

These discussions often strike me as a bit awkward. Technology moves on – nowhere is this fact more ever-present as in the world of gadgets. To be honest, I'm surprised that Apple held on to the iPod Classic this long, the company could have already out-phased it years ago. I still remember my first black iPod (5th gen) and I have great memories from that time, but then I got an iPod Touch (for free) and later an iPhone and I never looked back! What got me was the touch interface that made digital music palpable again, while the iPod still felt like just a bunch of files on a hard-drive, packed with tiny artwork. The iPod just felt very "geeky". Didn't work for me anymore.

Also, going from 30 GB of storage to the much smaller iPod Touch (I think it was 8 GB at the time) made me discover something wonderful: curating your on-the-go music is a great experience and, to me at least, feels much better than having "everything" with you. It's having only your most treasured albums in your pocket (and which ones are "treasured" changes almost weekly). That way it's always easy to choose what to play.

So, while I find many of the reactions on the internet over this news to be a bit hard to understand und ultimately selfish, I definitely can relate to this kind of reaction:
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/rip-ipod/
"On Death and iPods: A Requiem"
= a nice article, although I don't agree with the bit on Bookends.

 

Might I make a slight side-step in this thread and ask if anybody, like myself, who is now faced with "moving on" from the iPod and yet, wants a large chunk of my "iTunes Library" to be mobile in my hands, what do you suggest? (Note: I'm not talking about the "cloud", but rather a laptop or iPad type of device, that can be hooked up to a large sound system, NOT used for headphone listening, as I rarely ever do that!)

 

I spotted a 160Gb Classic in a pawn shop yesterday for $109, so I know the first place I'll look if mine ever quits.

 

Or Kijiji or Craigslist.

 

Classic!

 

Interesting article - thanks for posting.

One thing I will admit though is the convenience of taking only one gadget with me hiking, to the gym, on a walk, etc. I do recall the hassle factor in lugging multiple devices, and in these instances I didn't need 10,000 songs with me.

 

My kid has some Android devices that can charge without using ANY sort of connector. He has a "pad" of some sort and if he puts the device on top of it - it charges somehow using the flat pad... no concern about the connector and what orientation is required...

I don't really care about the merits of one connector versus another... what I care about is when the tail wags the dog.

It's no fun when the vendor of a $200 device that was purchased to complement a $3,000 system decides to make a minor change that makes the $3,000 system irrelevant.

I only went and got a nice headunit for my car (and accompanying speakers and amplifier) because there were this nice little thing that could supply music to it. And my car became this incredible place to enjoy - actually encouraging me to drive places so I could enjoy the music along the way.

It's the ripple effect that concerns me and the absolute disregard for this ripple effect that will probably force me to go back in time and start listening to regular radio in my car (when autos stop supporting the ability to talk to 30 pin devices).

I'm hoping that eventually that blue-tooth wireless will save the day and connectors in cars won't matter - but I suspect the trend will be for devices and head-units to support text (only) between them and forget about the graphics and video that I currently enjoy.

My brother in law always says to me "use blue tooth" and I always reply "and what blue tooth solution have you seen that sends album artwork and video over it?" He then always replies "Why do you care about artwork?"

My reply is I've invested FIVE years of my life adding unique artwork to almost every one of the 30,000+ tracks in my Itunes library... the point of that exercise was to SEE it.

Last time I checked, Apple hasn't added an I-headunit to their product line... so Apple can't save the day - all they can do is piss off Kenwood, Pioneer, Sony, Phillips, etc and sending them all scrambling to partner with Google.
That's the problem with the lightning debacle... Apple abandoned something that almost EVERY hardware vendor supported... hoping that they would just drop everything and follow.

The jury is out on that question - but I'm not optimistic. The answer will become clear (to me) when I go to buy my next car in a few years.

I asked earlier if someone could name ONE company that has been successful by irking its customers ?

I'd like to alter that question, name one company that continued to be successful after irking companies that it had (explicit or implicit) partnerships with - where the partner companies were a key driver to continued business with the typical end customer?

Pissing off car radio vendors isn't the same thing as pissing off the small companies that makes the little slip covers for the ever changing portable devices. Change the size of a device or where the holes used to be - the owner throws out a $20 slipcover and buys a different $20 slipcover.

Change the design from a 30 pin connector to a lightning connector, and the guy with the expensive radio he bought two months before the lightning enabled device hits the market, decides that its simply better to live with the old Iphone-4 he bought two years ago (and its flaws) until the Iphone-4 dies a natural death... because the guy with the new car and new car head-unit doesn't have a way to USE the new Iphone-5 with the new connector (except for charging) in his car.

Every seemingly little minor tweak in the basic design creates a new set of balkanized customers who can't leave their little island.

I read something once about how Steve Jobs never installed license plates on his car - because he didn't want someone to know his plate number... he apparently exploited a loop-hole in California law that would let him drive around for 60 days with a temporary tag and then BOUGHT ANOTHER CAR (every two months) when it was time to get a real tag.

I have no clue if that's true - but the idea is insane.

Unfortunately it's also consistent with Apple's complete inability to understand how often normal people buy cars and how the purchase of a car might impact the purchase (or non-purchase) of a little device that might use the (pre-existing) wiring inside of a car.

 

There was a comment above about "curating" one's collection... trimming it so it has only the essentials.

Funny thing is if I wanted to listen to my old favorites - I could have easily done it the old fashioned way...

I do remember once upon a time using a cassette walkman on a beach. I didn't drag extra cassettes with me.

I was limited to 90 minutes... and I gave careful thought about how to use those 90 minutes.

More importantly, my cassette walkman wasn't "Hal" and it couldn't help me find things that were hiding in the deepest darkest parts of my library.

Funny thing is the three Ipod classics I filled really don't have too many complete albums on them.

Not because I don't like complete albums - but because when I started to drift into the Itunes world I realized I could use the "large canvas" to hold compilations. In a database, it doesn't matter if Paul McCartney's cover of the old Elvis song "Now or Never" lives on a double LP called "The Last Temptation of Elvis"... or a special Paul McCartney playlist... or a special Elvis playlist... the beauty is it could live on ALL of these above places simultaneously.

And once I realized this, my focus on ripping was almost primarily to add nothing BUT compilations to my library - simply because they were always a messy nuisance that I never really thought about listening to (in the pre-Ipod era).

What I didn't realize when I started on my journey was how many damn compilations I own... or that my thirst for buying NEW compilations would increase !

Case in point, last weekend I bought a 5 CD "Best of the 80s" box set the other day on some minor label. Cheap... like 100 songs for 12 bucks. It was the kind of thing I would never have purchased previously... but it now seems perfect for helping to beef up a "Class of 1985" playlist.

At the same time, I also bought Rod Stewart's "Storyteller" box set (it was cheap... $15). What happened when I got home? I got thinking about the other phases of Rod's career, and I went to Amazon and bought "Five Guys Walked into a Bar" box set by The Faces... and two old Jeff Beck Group albums with Rod Stewart on them...

Yes... I now SHOP for music as a way to provide content for my ever expanding, ever hungry playlists.

I really don't get the whole idea of using the thing as a new fangled CD player. I understand that's how many people use their digital library... but if I was going to do that - I'd just grab a couple of CDs every time I leave the house.

The cool thing about an Ipod is I can instantly jump from a Rod Stewart album to Faces album to a Jeff Beck Group album. And the more that kind of correlation appeals to you, the more obvious it becomes that more space is always useful...

 

My Pioneer unit (whose nags screens I hate) supports the 30 pin for music and graphics. I believe that it is some stupid other cable if you want to connect a lightning device or a Android device. This would require disassembling the dash to get at the back of the unit to swap out the cable. Why the inbreds (one of the few slurs I can think of - perhaps the PC term is genetically looped/redundant/self-replicating) at Pioneer didn't provide a short extension cable for the custom cable to negate the requirement is something that I don't know. I believe there is also some connection to the HDMI input required for anything without a 30pin connector. One of the advantages of a wired connector over Bluetooth is that it charges your device too.

I know someone on this forum was wanting a head unit that shuffles albums. The Pioneer SPH-DA110 does that, but, GOTCHA it decides on the album, you don't. At least that is my takeaway from the Instruction Manual.

 

Well written piece.

The constant talk about music theft didn't resonate with me, but that's because I've
always paid for music and that didn't stop when Napster caught my attention.

I also don't think that my friend has died... he's just been put on house arrest.

My friend, I'll call him "Hal", will continue to live in a computer in my house.

But in a few short years, he won't be able to go for a walk, or for a ride in the car.

All because some genius didn't understand how important it was to let "Hal" wander.


If worse comes to worst, and my computers die accidentally in a flood - I'll still have the
memory of all the music Hal once played for me.

I remember a long time ago, when I was a young man in college, my neighbor tried to argue with me that I couldn't "live" without my albums... and I argued, much to his dismay, that those albums don't live on the vinyl, that they live inside of ME... and I walk around with the music in my HEAD... and if my ability to PLAY my records ended - I would survive.

He didn't believe me.

And I understood how that SEEMED like an obvious observation - because he was talking to a young man with more records than anyone he had ever met...

But I think he gave short shrift to what I *did* with that music.

It was (and still is) fuel for my soul.

So yeah... I'm kind of upset that a key player in the hardware business decided I wasn't relevant.

But I'm not gonna storm the gates in Cupertino.

I'm just going to stop buying Apple products that have little or no relevance (to me).
I'll probably buy one more AppleTV for a HiFi in a different room, and then it will be a waiting game to see which one of my four AppleTVs dies first.

Not because I'm mad or angry at Apple. I'm honestly not TRYING to cut off my nose to spite my face.

Apple eliminated the equipment used to cook the food that my nose liked to smell.

Good luck, Apple...

I hope you do well selling to people who are fine with listening to a small
subset of what was once in their pocket.

 

My Pioneer AVIC X920BT had a short cable like you are talking about.

It was a much better design than the Pioneer I have now - which has the exact problem you are talking about.

If you have the same unit as me, my son claims you can buy a different HDMI adaptor - and the "android" wire can suddenly become an "Iphone 5" adaptor... but I'm not certain since I haven't tried it.

But if you have a family where somone has an Android and someone else has an Iphone-5, you're going to have to keep both adaptors in the glove box and swap them depending on who wants to use the wire into the headunit.

The older design was cleaner - but Pioneer was trying to please less masters.

I strongly believe - given what my kid can do with his Android (using some beta software he read about on the internet and installed on his phone) that Apple is about to get left in the dust with respect to available features in the car.

Remember the scene in "Network" where Ned Beatty yells at Peter Finch about how he messed with the primal forces of nature ? Apple's about to feel like Albert Beale when it becomes clear that their constant inability to pick a direction (any direction !) and stick with it left a huge gaping hole for its (previously handicapped) competitors to fill.

 

Both of my pioneer head units could do Album shuffle.

There was an icon you had to change... from a "note" to what looks like a "disc"

A "note" represents a song shuffle... a "disc" represent an album shuffle.

Those little icons are overlayed with a thing that looks like an "x" (a shuffle icon)

If there is no "x" - its straight play.

So you just toggle between the three options and it goes from

"no shuffle" to "song shuffle" to "album shuffle"

Pretty easy to do.

My beef was they dropped the "link" function from my new Pioneer that could easily naturally stop a shuffle and send the listening experience somewhere else... to the complete album - or to the complete set of tracks by the same artist - for the song that was currently playing...

 

That's about 50,000 Guided By Voices songs, not quite the whole catalog.

 

I understand curating what goes on my DAP. I've started doing it within a week of buying my first DAP, a Rio that could take 512MB SD cards. Every iPod I've bought, I've had more music than will fit. My library had 3TB of lossless and 530GB of lossy files. I really have no choice but to curate what I put on my iPod. In the last week, I've had two instances when I was telling someone about some music, but since it isn't on my iPod, I couldn't play it for them. Before someone says to use the cloud, I won't use up my data plan to stream music and the WIFI at work is very unreliable with iPhones for some reason so the cloud is not an option.

As far as moving forward, other than a solid state drive and maybe the touch screen, IMO the iPhone is a big step back as a music player. I bought an iPhone 4 shortly after it came out. I loaded some music on it and pretty quickly came to loath the interface. The worst was it didn't handle compilations. I've yet to see a good interface for music on a touch screen. The streaming services's interfaces are pretty bad too. I was so disgusted with the iPhone's interface, I haven't tried it since. I think I will go back and try it, since that was 3 versions, and tomorrow 4 versions, of iOs ago. It may have improved some.

I think Apple has become a big company and in my experience, big companies in most industries don't really move forward. The iPhone is a perfect example. It was innovative when it came out, now it's playing catch up to Android.

 

That's why I love shuffle by album. The juxtapositions can be great Rock to Avant Garde Jazz to Early Music to Trip Hop. It's great. I also end up hearing albums I haven't listened to for years and would never think to put on a small volume player. Every time that happens, I wonder why I haven't listened to the album in so long.

When I had a cassette Walkman, I used to carry a box of tapes in my back pack. For a portable CD player, I used to carry a binder of 30 CDs with me. The iPod Classic saved me a lot of room and weight.

 

From what I've read, one of the functions they dropped with the lightning connector is control functions. So no controlling the iPod/iPhone from an external device thought the lightning connector.

 

Shuffle didn't turn out to be the lifeless random process I assumed it would be in the mp3/flac world.

Doing "track shuffle" on one single CD provided absolutely NO merit.

Loading up a multi-disc CD player with 5 to 100 to 200 to 300 discs also had problems.

Mostly I got paranoid the day I loaded up a 100 disc CD player that if a burglar came into my house and grabbed the player, he would be walking away with more value (to me) than he could comprehend. I actually toyed with putting a note on the thing that said something like "Dear Mr. Burglar... take the player if you must... but please leave the discs..." but then I decided it would just be easier for me to sleep at night if I didn't load the thing.

I tried burning CD-Rs to fill the multi-disc beast - but that was tedious.

Clearly it's less of a disaster if Mr. Burglar stole my CD-R copies - LOL

I've never been worried about a burglar stealing LPs or CDs... I figured Mr. Burglar would break his back (and be there all night) if he tried. Last time I moved from one residence from another (in 1991), the paid professionals were ready to kill me for hiring them to carry a never ending procession of boxes out to the truck.


Anyway... back to shuffle...

It's a glorious moment when a shuffle stumbles across a forgotten, but most worthy song or album.

It's like having an old girlfriend call you up and say "Hey, how ya doing?"

There never was an ugly break-up with her... you're not even sure why you drifted apart - LOL


I've seen enough "suggested playlists" from google to know that the music genome project technology developed for Pandora is probably the DJ behind the google curtain. Without fail, I'd say that 98% percent of the google suggested playlists (from the 20,000 songs I uploaded from my Itunes library to the Google cloud) are worthy.

In contrast, very few Apple "genius" playlists are worth paying attention to. I'd say they click with me about 2% of the time. If I wanted to hear the same songs that get played on FM radio, I'd just tune into an FM radio.

 

Beats doesn't do to bad a job at matching my tastes to suggested playlists, and the playlists are good. The only real problem with them is that I use Beats to listen to new releases so I end up listening to quite a few albums I never want to hear again. So I end up getting suggestions based on that. For some reason, Beats thinks I like 90s indie hits

 

So they basically just want that wire to act like a blue tooth connection - with the possible addition of artwork.

Brilliantly stupid.


Has anyone actually seen artwork displayed on a car unit through a lightning connected Iphone???

If they dropped artwork in addition to control, I'll state even more loudly that they don't understand WHY people felt a connection with some of their products.

 

Adiós

 

I just had a curiously bad moment using Google's cloud service.

Last year, I uploaded 20,000 songs to the cloud. As I was doing this, Google was making suggestions about "radio" stations.

By and large, without fail, I was always impressed by the suggestions it made.

When I looked at the recommended stations, I was pleasantly surprised to find it wouldn't make obvious suggestions:

For example, Google said "I recommend you listen to a radio station with music that sounds like "Liverpool Blues" by The Vipers"

My response was... hmmm.... Siri would never make that suggestion... let me hear what you got.... and then I would get
this incredible sequence of songs that were all pretty much similar to this old Skiffle song... BUT.... not necessarily stuck inside of the Skiffle genre...

Other recommended stations ?

"Chief Kamanawalea" radio (based on an old Turtles song)...
"Monkey's Uncle" radio (based on the old Annette Funicello / Beach Boys song)
"The Snake" radio (based on an old pre-Motown Isley Brothers song)
"Thundercrack" radio (old Springsteen song)
"James Bond" radio (that played mostly cool guitar based instrumentals from the early 6os)

I realize the suggestions were all based on old songs... but that was partly because I was uploading from Itunes year - by - year... and I started with my oldest stuff first and I was advancing forward - when I hit the 20,000 song limit... and basically stopped.

But by and large, I loved each and every station Google created - and the VARIETY of stations it created. I probably never would have done ANY of that on my own. The only "me" in the equation was I supplied the 20,000 songs it was using.


So today, I decide I might as well give the "all access" service a try.... That's where you pay a monthly fee and they give you access to almost anything in the universe. Led Zeppelin happens to be missing from that universe, but that's not Google's fault. I noticed Zep was missing last June when I told my son to play one of the bonus tracks on the remasters - and he was shocked to learn Google didn't have permission to stream Led Zeppelin. He had to amend his comment about how his google account could play "anything"...

My son has been constantly telling me for almost a year how much I would ENJOY being able to play ANYTHING.

But I kept thinking to myself that being ABLE to play ANYTHING would mean that I would also have access to too much that I don't want to hear... my instinct is it would be like the story of Midas who discovered it was not useful to have EVERYTHING he touches turn into gold... So I ignored my son's enthusiastic recommendation and I ignored the "all access" service... but I kept telling myself that maybe someday I would change my mind.

Well tonight was Google's chance to change my mind.

My first real curiosity about the "all access" service was "Will I be able to upload beyond the 20,000 song limit if I buy the service?"

No... I don't think I can... but the jury is out - partly because of what happened the moment I turned the service on....

Those old stations that it recommended for me last year... they were replaced.... at first, they appeared to be there... For example, I still saw the "Monkey's Uncle" station... but when I went and played it... I got a bunch of Disney tunes... literally children's movie music - and no Beach Boys or Ventures or other cool surf music (that used to be part of that "radio station")... even worse - I can't figure out how to tell Google to STOP trying to lump the entire record universe in with my relatively small corner of it.

"James Bond Theme" radio ?? Now, that radio station can't seem to think outside the universe of the 20 or so theme songs to each of those movies. Never mind that the original theme was previously a springboard for cool guitar instrumentals.

MY uploaded library is now .001 percent of the Google library - and Google is bound and determined to make sure I hear things that it THINKS I like from the other 99.999 percent of the universe....

There's a REASON I never purchased that stuff. It never caught my fancy.

In some cases, Google played some stuff that I own - but I never got the chace to upload... or it played something that I found pleasing and didn't mind listening to.... but by and large - it was completely clueless about how to avoid music that I don't own and would NEVER purchase. It was worse than constantly trying to sell me stuff - it was like Google suddenly forgot what I liked and decided my taste was aligned with every other person in the universe.

A simple toggle switch that says something like "keep this radio station focused on my library" toggled with "let my radio station put its toe into the musical ocean" would have been nice. I could enjoy the ability to expand my horizons... while being able to go back and feel some pride when I tell "Hal" to play MY music and play it in a sequence I had never imagined (and more importantly, in a sequence that was both new and pleasing).

Motown???? Forget that dream... "Hal" now thinks any old R&B is the same as the stuff recorded in that glorious snakepit on Grand Ave.

But even worse... all of the previous stations now seem to have been displaced with the starter stations that Google serves up to newbies... just 10 or so very bland "genre-based" stations... never mind that my uploaded library had maybe 50 or 60 different genres in it... the oddest genre in my library is probably "Australian Drinking Songs" - I have exactly one song currently aligned with that genre... a tune called "A Pub with No Beer" by Slim Dusty... something I found on the 1959-A "British Hit Parade" 6 disc box set...

My instincts were correct... being given access to ANYthing is a big problem because it now feels like I can't FIND anything.

When I cancel the "all access" service, I'm hoping that the cool suggestions will return - but I think they may now be gone forever. :-(


And I don't think thumbs down can fix this...

 

You'd have to do an awful lot of thumbs down. The only "radio" service I've used is Pandora and it's recommendations are pretty good. I discovered a lot of interesting music with it. The problem is is it repeats a lot. After a dozen or so listens to a station, you stop hearing new stuff.