My favorite new 'tool' (toy)

My favorite new music gadget is the iPod shuffle. Whenever you join a new band there's always a lot of new tunes to learn. If you're lucky, like I am, the band has recordings of their tunes already. Loading this puppy up with all the tunes I've needed to learn has be great as a learning tool. These days I mostly walk to wear I'm going, but I also have an 1/8" input in my car stereo. So, wherever I am it's really easy to schlep this thing along and listen to the tunes I need to learn. I picked this model up on eBay for around $50, so I'm really not out too much if it's damaged or stolen.

Here's how it works... put the shuffle on the dock, that's connected to your computer via usb.

Then, in iTunes you have a couple options for getting tunes on to the iPod. One option is to use "autofill".

With autofill you choose your library or a playlist and then iTunes automatically chooses random tunes to fill the shuffle.

If you're familiar with smart playlists there are a lot of cool things you can do with those to update your shuffle. For example, you could create a smart playlist that grabs 1 gig worth of random albums. Then, when you listen to your shuffle you can choose to play in order as opposed to on shuffle and you'll get full random album play. Or, you could create a smart playlist that represents your least played songs, if you'd like to start listening to stuff you haven't heard that much. I haven't been using autofill that much, because I simply drag the recordings that I got from the band right onto the shuffle.

Another great feature of iTunes is sound check. Sound check is basically a volume normalizer / limiter / compressor. You can enable it on your shuffle's settings page.

I'm typically wary of these kinds of things because they tend to change the dynamics of a recording. So far, sound check has been awesome. You don't hear it's effects through the playback of a song, just on the entire song itself. I haven't tested it out on recordings with lots of dynamics, like classical music, but it's really helped level the volume on the recordings I've been listening to. They vary from home studio style recordings to live recordings of gigs, so the levels can be noticeably different.

If you're looking for a new mp3 player and have a limited budget, I'd definitely recommend the new shuffle. It's a tiny device that packs a ton of cool features combined with iTunes.