I finally gave in an bought a 40GB iPod this afternoon.  I intend to use it as much as a hard drive as an mp3 player though I’m already addicted to having music follow me everywhere, so it may wind up changing the way I listen to music – we’ll see how that pans out.

Where it will be useful (and has already been) is when the band is learning a new cover song and we need to find a copy of the song to refresh the memories of how it goes and work out the details etc.  Previously I’d have to go home, burn a CD and remember to bring it with me to the next rehearsal whereas now I can just plug the iPod into the PA and hear the song.  That alone will be worth the money over time and it only works if you can store your entire music collection on the player, easily carry it in your pocket (my hands are full carrying instruments and assorted paraphernalia) and most importantly, be able to navigate the songs quickly and easily.  I don’t know of anything other than the iPod that meets those requirements.  The fact that all my music is already stored, sorted and correctly tagged in iTunes (it’s only taken about 4 years to get there) is a major bonus.

I’m hoping it will also be useful for when I write musicals so I can go sit somewhere relaxing or sit in a coffee shop to write and still be able to hear the songs I’m writing into the story line.  It’s very frustrating to write three or four scenes only to get home and discover that the songs you wrote in have slightly different lyrics that make them not fit into the story line properly or a slightly different feel that doesn’t suit the mood.  Now that won’t be a problem and with a couple of weeks holidays coming up I’m looking forward to getting away and focussing on writing for a while to try it out.

A huge amount of the benefit of the iPod though is the fact that it’s an external hard drive that’s about as fast as my laptop’s internal drive.  So it’s perfect for keeping backups on and for installing other OS versions for testing etc.  Since I do most of the Mac testing for work and the iPod and my laptop will be used for that I can even claim a percentage of it off tax.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the headphones are very carefully designed.  If you try to put them in the wrong ears they keep falling out but if you get them the right way around the sit very snugly and don’t feel like they’re going to fall out at all.  Instead of just being round like most in-ear style headphones they have a slightly oblong shape to them so that they wedge into your ear securely.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve used in-ear headphones so perhaps that’s standard now but it’s definitely a very nice feature and one that I’ve not heard mentioned before.  For such tiny little speakers the quality is brilliant too.

Oh and I’m already a big fan of the Music Quiz game.  It plays a snippet of a random song from your library and provides a list of 5 songs from which you have to pick the song that’s playing.  I’m going to have to catch a train somewhere just so I can get some good playing time in…