My iPod nano

Remembering the good old days of using the iPod

Posted On: Mon Jul 1, 2024

A while back I wrote a post on the apps that I use to stream music. However, before I had my own smartphone and before streaming services became popular, I used an iPod nano to listen to music. If you don’t remember it, an iPod nano is similar to an iPod shuffle but with an LCD screen. (I don’t have my iPod with me anymore but here is a photo of it I found.)

I graciously received my friend’s iPod Nano after asking if I could have it, as he was already using his phone for listening to music.

I loved my iPod and I used it all the time to listen to songs. If I remember correctly, my iPod had 8GB of storage and that was plenty of space to store more than a thousand songs. Since it was so small, I could carry it in my pocket anywhere.

One of the great benefits of using an iPod was that I had complete control over my library. I decided what songs should be in my library not some algorithm. Since all the songs were stored locally, I could listen to my favoruite songs offline too.

You needed to connect to a computer to download music to your iPod. Even though it may seem inconvenient, the process of loading music into the iPod was kind of fun. I usually would spend time adding metadata and album art to each track that I downloaded.

These days, using a streaming service like Spotify gets you access to millions of songs within seconds. I have discovered a lot of good songs thanks to the algorithm. But you don’t have full control or ownership of songs. Sometimes, the songs in your library may even vanish all of a sudden due to licensing agreements or the artist’s decision. Plus, these streaming services are a privacy nightmare and collect a lot of data about you.

Even though the era of the mp3 players can be considered as dead, there are still a large number of people who prefer storing music locally on their device or hosting music on a server and this is analogous to using your own iPod or mp3 player.

I highly recommend you to check out Jeff Geerling’s video - Forget spaceships, I just want my music

This is day 31 of #100DaystoOffload