iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Chapter 3. The iPod Shuffle

It may not have all the colorful bells and whistles of its big siblings, but the screen-free iPod Shuffle is just right for many people. The Shuffle, Apple’s lightest and least expensive member of the modern iPod family, is a no-nonsense portable jukebox that puts the focus squarely on the sound.

You can store up to one gigabyte of your favorite songs, podcasts, audiobooks, or data files on an iPod Shuffle, and with its minimum of fragile, scratchable parts, you don’t have to worry about cracking its screen or busting its hard drive if you accidentally drop it. The iPod Shuffle has a lot to offer, and this chapter shows you how to tap into its full potential.

Meet the iPod Shuffle

Just by looking at Figure 3-1, it’s pretty obvious that the iPod Shuffle is much different from the bigger iPods and iPod Nanos described previously. For starters, it’s barely over three inches tall, there’s no display screen, and the click wheel looks like it shrank in the dryer. And you don’t even need a cable to do the Shuffle—this tiny music machine plugs directly into your computer’s USB port.

A regular iPod has a miniature hard drive to store 30 to 60 gigabytes of music and data, but like the iPod Nano, the iPod Shuffle uses a small chip of flash memory to store its contents. This is the same type of memory used in the ubiquitous USB flash drive (snapped on the end of a keychain or tucked in a shirt pocket) that has replaced floppy disks as a way to carry around files from ...