Apple's iPod Came Out Two Decades Ago 103
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: On October 23, 2001, Apple released the iPod -- a portable media player that promised to overshadow the clunky design and low storage capacity of MP3 players introduced in the mid-1990s. The iPod boasted the ability to "hold 1,000 songs in your pocket". Its personalized listening format revolutionized the way we consume music. And with more than 400 million units sold since its release, there's no doubt it was a success. Yet, two decades later, the digital music landscape continues to rapidly evolve.
The iPod expanded listening beyond the constraints of the home stereo system, allowing the user to plug into not only their headphones, but also their car radio, their computer at work, or their hi-fi system at home. It made it easier to entwine these disparate spaces into a single personalized soundtrack throughout the day. [...] The rise of touchscreen smartphones ultimately led to the iPod's downfall. Interestingly, the music app on the original iPhone was called "iPod." The iPod's functions were essentially reappropriated and absorbed into the iPhone. The iPhone was a flexible and multifunctional device: an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator all in one -- a computer in your pocket. And by making the development tools for their products freely available, Apple and Google allowed third-party developers to create apps for their new platforms in the thousands.
As of this year, mobile devices are responsible for 54.8% of web traffic worldwide. And while music piracy still exists, its influence has been significantly reduced by the arrival of streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube. These platforms have had a profound effect on how we engage with music as active and passive listeners. Spotify supports an online community-based approach to music sharing, with curated playlists. [...] As of February this year, more than 60,000 tracks were being uploaded to Spotify each day. The experience of listening to music will become increasingly immersive with time, and we'll only find more ways to seamlessly integrate it into our lives.
The iPod expanded listening beyond the constraints of the home stereo system, allowing the user to plug into not only their headphones, but also their car radio, their computer at work, or their hi-fi system at home. It made it easier to entwine these disparate spaces into a single personalized soundtrack throughout the day. [...] The rise of touchscreen smartphones ultimately led to the iPod's downfall. Interestingly, the music app on the original iPhone was called "iPod." The iPod's functions were essentially reappropriated and absorbed into the iPhone. The iPhone was a flexible and multifunctional device: an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator all in one -- a computer in your pocket. And by making the development tools for their products freely available, Apple and Google allowed third-party developers to create apps for their new platforms in the thousands.
As of this year, mobile devices are responsible for 54.8% of web traffic worldwide. And while music piracy still exists, its influence has been significantly reduced by the arrival of streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube. These platforms have had a profound effect on how we engage with music as active and passive listeners. Spotify supports an online community-based approach to music sharing, with curated playlists. [...] As of February this year, more than 60,000 tracks were being uploaded to Spotify each day. The experience of listening to music will become increasingly immersive with time, and we'll only find more ways to seamlessly integrate it into our lives.
jeez I feel old (Score:2)
Bought one the day it came out.
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What's an iPod?
It's like a Zune except it can't squirt on you.
No wireless. Less space than Nomad. Lame (Score:2)
Here's the famous Cmdr Taco review on slashdot.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/2... [slashdot.org]
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An iPhone without the phone app. A bit like a miniature iPad.
You can still buy them.
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Well, no. Only later generations became phone-less iphones. The first ipods were only music players.
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My iPod (a 30 GB Color model) died a few years ago. The last song it played before the battery failed was "Highway to Hell", ironically enough :)
Ah Rob Malda (Score:5, Funny)
Where's Kathleen Fent? (Score:1)
That's one fine woman. I'd like to marry her.
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And 20 years later, the prediction ended up being right. Apple doesn't sell many iPods anymore. They're all in on that phone thing now.
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The amazing thing is several ex-Apple employees started a spinoff with Apple being a minority investor called General Magic [wikipedia.org]. They had a smartphone with a personal digital assistant in 1994. Apple basically absorbed a lot of the ideas to release the iPhone in 2007. That thing pre-dates the iPod and could do what it did and more. Paul Allen (of Microsoft) bought most of their patents when they went defunct, including USB, streaming TV, and small touchscreens.
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The Magic Link devices did not have cellular and would in no way be considered a smartphone. They had a few interesting ideas but they were terrible devices. The UI was clunky to the point of unusable which was done no favors by the vastly underpowered hardware. Also Tony Fadell (of General Magic) was brought in to work on the iPod and then became SVP of that division.
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Re:Ah Rob Malda (Score:5, Informative)
I think everyone gets it, but in case there are any new friends among us:
https://slashdot.org/story/01/... [slashdot.org]
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Rob wasn't wrong though. The iPod was not a great product, but it sold because it had an Apple logo on it and was inside the reality distortion field.
It used Firewire rather than USB. You could connect it to USB but it wouldn't charge, and the battery would die before you could load all your music on.
iTunes has always been a POS, but back then it had a really nasty habit of deleting music off your iPod if it wasn't also in your library with the exact same metadata. It was hell if you had multiple computers.
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Re: Ah Rob Malda (Score:2)
Yup, all those reasons explain perfectly why it never amounted to anything. I mean who even remembers it? Itâ(TM)s not like weâ(TM)re talking about it all these years later.
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Being crap isn't the same as being forgettable. Windows XP was 20 this week, that got plenty of coverage.
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I feel like the scrollwheel made the difference though! that really was a great way to get through piles of music that AFAIK its contemporaries couldn't match.
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It's like you're striving to be wrong with your comments. I commend your commitment.
The first two generations of iPod only supported FireWire. FireWire charged it fine while loading music. The third generation added USB 2 support. An actual USB 2 port would charge it just fine. But good job juxtaposing two generations of a device years apart and still making
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"No wireless."
-> No headphone jack.
"Less space than a nomad."
-> No replaceable battery.
Nice to know that the spirit of that comment is still alive and well here on /., with nerds making CmdrTaco's mistake over and over again, on nearly every story about the iPhone.
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Rob Malda was right that the iPod was lame. I don't recall whether he made predictions about whether it would succeed, however. People buy a lot of lame shit.
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As opposed to the non-nerd mistake of conflating "popular with mundanes" with "good."
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I did get a iPod mini as I liked the relatively large hard drive and the transfer speed of FireWire. It was the beginning of the decade trend to carry all your music with you. Now, of course, fewer people buy music and we are all streaming. It used to
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In retrospect, wireless was somewhat unreasonable to ask for any small device at the time. Back in 2001, most wireless chipsets were 802.11a with 802.11b just starting to be released. There was very few WiFi hotspots.
And that is availability. Wireless was impractical to add in such a small device. The smallest chipsets form factors were PCMCIA for laptops. Wireless drained a lot of battery. The iPod like most other players had CPUs that were only powerful enough to play music and handle the UI. The firmware
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Traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
s of this year, mobile devices are responsible for 54.8% of web traffic worldwide.
and a good percentage of that is tracking data.
Missed Opportunity (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Missed Opportunity (Score:4, Informative)
Apple missed and opportunity with the iPod nano. They should have made a series of products that the nano could plug into that would make head sets, car stereos, boom boxes, etc into MP3 players. The nano could be uploaded to and then placed in any of these products without using blue tooth or a wire.
Uhm...there were variants of nearly all of those things that had built-in 30-pin dock connectors (and lightning connectors later on). Perhaps one could make the argument that Apple could have made first party products like this, but there was most certainly an ecosystem for quite some time.
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The 30 pin connector was great for its time because it provided some structural support for the device, where it could sit vertically in a dock without needing other support. For a while, there were a lot of iHome or other digital clocks that had iPod stands. Even some car stereo heads could, with a press of a button extend a stand for an iPod and be able to control it while sitting there.
Times change though... the phone winds up on a charging area, and all that stuff is now communicating via Bluetooth.
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There were multiple incompatible versions of the 30 pin dock connector. I think it was a software issue but newer devices didn't work with some older ones. I remember there being a lot of iWaste back then, devices that still worked but needed an old iPod or iPhone to be useful.
Re: Missed Opportunity twice (Score:5, Funny)
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People buy vinyl these days because it looks nice nailed to the wall. A quick Google search turns up that about half of the people who buy vinyl records never play them, and 1/5 of the people can't play them even if they wanted to, because they don't even own a turntable.
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That does not sound remotely plausible.
I can imagine a set of vinyl records at a wall in a fancy bar/restaurant or club.
But that an ordinary person buys a vinyl record without having a turntable and a stereo: that does not make any sense at all.
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But that an ordinary person buys a vinyl record without having a turntable and a stereo: that does not make any sense at all.
You can't play a poster of your favorite band either, but some people buy those too.
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Take it a bit further... most of the people who even play vinyl at all now can't beat match. All they know how to do was crossfade. The skill even came so close to dying out that Technics quit making 1200s for several years there. And if you can find the new ones at all, they're so rare that they're jacked up to at least twice the standard price. I'm pretty sure new DJs never even consider learning to play on vinyl any more; and the 1200s being sold are just replacements for nightclubs or established ol
but the Pod-cast remains a thing (Score:1)
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Now that the i-pod is gone, people in 10 years will wonder why we call these "podcasts"
what's with the pod thing they will say...
I remember seeing it in a store (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I remember seeing it in a store (Score:5, Informative)
I had one of those Creative Lab ones. Those things where pieces of shit. It had two advantages to the ipod. Replaceable battery and you could upgrade the hard drive on it.
While those sound great, the shitty user interface and and hard limit on number of MP3 you could put on it. An when I mean shitty user interface, it was just that, very shitty.
Re:I remember seeing it in a store (Score:4, Informative)
I still have a Nomad Jukebox. Six gigs, using a 2.5" drive. In theory, it could be upgraded via dd-ing the drive image to another, larger drive, putting in the larger drive, and formatting it. However, there still is a song limitation, so I've not bothered... and thankfully NomadSync exists, which is GPL and allows one to copy to and from the device with a modern OS.
At the time, the Nomad Jukebox, and the Nomad II players had one nice innovation: You could copy the MP3 files from the device back to a hard disk starting with their second rev of their player software (their first rev didn't allow copying back.) At the time, there were a ton of MP3 players coming out, all with SDMI compliant DRM, and all kinds of DRM-encumberance. Sony had their OpenMG software which didn't allow copies... you had to check out and check in your music, and one couldn't check out the same song more than three times, so if one formatted their MP3 player instead of checking in their tunes, they lost that checkin. Then, restoring your collection required having to contact Sony to get a one time unlock key. Their memory stick player required sending back to the company in order for it to be upgraded to work with Windows 2000 or later.
Apple did a tap dance around DRM. They didn't give a way to copy the music from the iPod to a machine... but you could mount the iPod as a drive, copy the files, and let a MP3 manager like MusicMatch rename the files back using the ID3 tags. Later on, their store's DRM allowed burning of MP3s to CD, which was better than virtually any other music store (after mp3.com got turfed) only sold heavily DRM-ed stuff. Thankfully after the mid-1990s, the entire SDMI thing was given up, and cheap WMA players just mounted as MTP/PTP drives or even external USB drives.
The real kudos of the entire thing belong to Diamond for the Rio. They spent so much money defending themselves that they wound up not being able to compete in the industry... but they were the ones that opened the door up for Apple.
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"The real kudos of the entire thing belong to Diamond for the Rio. They spent so much money defending themselves that they wound up not being able to compete in the industry... but they were the ones that opened the door up for Apple."
Yes, the Rio was best of breed and was vastly better than the Nomad or the iPod. They did the work, Apple got the credit (using a design they bought from another company, no less).
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To its credit, the Rio (PMP300 [arstechnica.com]) came out first, and showed the promise of MP3 players. But it held all of, what, 30 minutes of audio? Please explain what made it the "best of breed"? The clunky on-device UI, the limited storage and play time, or the need for an extra box to connect to a computer (via parallel port!)? The 20th anniversary of the Diamond Rio came and went a few years
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"I had one of those Creative Lab ones. Those things where pieces of shit. It had two advantages to the ipod. Replaceable battery and you could upgrade the hard drive on it."
And the standard hard drive was twice the capacity of the iPod (which came out later).
The Nomad was also the worst of the hard drive players at the time, though the most well known. Its UI was shitty, but the "number of MP3 you could put on it" was more than the iPod, so it's not clear why you are offering that criticism.
For the most pa
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Imagine being you, doubling down on an infamous Malda statement *20 years* after the fact. What a place the inside of your head must be.
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For the most part, the iPod fixed the shitty UI and vastly improved the holdability, but it cut the storage capacity in half, ruined the battery life and forced you into the Mac ecosystem. It was not a serious competitor to the Nomad, crappy as that UI was.
The Ipod was not a serious competitor to the Nomad? Lets see, 20 years later what mp3 player are we talking about? ipod or the nomad? I think we can safely say not only was the ipad a serious competitor, I think we can also add that it crushed the nomad in every area.
I owned a nomad, and never owned a ipod but I played with one for a few minutes. Even then I could tell you the ipod was superior to the nomad in everything but cost.
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Anything needing Apple software to be installed on your PC to use it is a POS. Nuf Said.
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Anything needing Apple software to be installed on your PC to use it is a POS. Nuf Said.
Other than cost, the fact that I could only access a ipod through itunes was another reason I went with a creative over the ipod. I tried itunes on windows, and now that was a huge piece of shit. Itunes ran so poorly on windows the first time I actually though it had a computer issue. I never dreamed anyone, much less apple, would release such a poorly performing product.
To be clear, I never hated my nomad. I used it for almost a decade before my phone got to where it could carry around enough music
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I'm the same way. I've wanted to see about an iPod Classic or something with the original form factor, perhaps the first gen with its mechanical wheel, just because that made such an impact at the time. However, the days of me ripping music to MP3 or AAC are long gone, and it goes to ALAC (I have a number of Apple devices, so might as well use that.)
Wish Apple could make a 20'th anniversery of the iPod Classic, except with 1-2 TB of storage, iPadOS, and the ability to be used as an external USB drive. Ap
Re:I remember seeing it in a store (Score:5, Interesting)
When the iPod was released the cheaper players were flash based giving them a fraction of the storage of the iPod and other HDD players. So they might be a third of the price with less than a twentieth of the storage. The iPod didn't cost much more than the Nomad Jukebox while being similar in size to flash based players.
The iPod's overall UX was way better than other HDD players of the time. The device fit in one hand and could be navigated with one hand. It also did the library management with iTunes on your much faster computer so it didn't need to figure out broken ID3 tags and weird file names. This meant the UI was very snappy and wasn't wasting CPU time reading metadata from files but instead from it's pre-processed library database.
These things combined meant you could have days worth of music you could easily navigate one handed on a device that fit in actual human pockets. Just having a feature list on the back of the packaging isn't all that meaningful if those features aren't implemented well. Even a well implemented feature with a terrible interface might as well not exist as far as the user is concerned.
Apple sold a good product for a relatively small premium over competitors. The iPod definitely didn't fit any definition of a Veblen good. It's disingenuous to compare iPods to the far less capable flash players of the day and claim it was overpriced.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. (Score:1)
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Think I read that somewhere.
Nah, you’re imagining things.
aww :( (Score:2)
A very Slashdot 2021 story (Score:3)
The story talks about the iPod being released “20 years ago today” - on October 23, 2001.
We finally see it here on the 20 year + 3 day anniversary.
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Shirley, this article is just the obligatory dupe!
We should at least link the 20y old ./ article (Score:3, Informative)
https://slashdot.org/story/01/... [slashdot.org]
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Man, it's kind of amusing to read through the comments from back then. See how much the world has changed, and how much it hasn't.
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I'm 99% certain that I read that article the day it dropped. Geez.
1st gen iPod touch still in use (Score:2)
I'm actually still using my iPod touch, sits by my bed as an alarm. With airplane mode, it lasts ~3 weeks per charge, and enjoy waking up to favourite tunes from like 15yrs ago..haha
Obviously phones do this, but at least this way I can leave the phone in another room and get a break from it.
Anyone else still using these older devices?
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I still use a newer iPod Touch. They are excellent for running authenticator apps and staying offline, where if one loses access to an app, or an app syncs corrupted data, one still can access their 2FA codes. This saved me when one auth app I used synced corrupted stuff. Had I not have had the iPod Touch in airplane mode, it would have been painful to impossible to recover stuff.
One might even find one useful for crypto wallet software, but I'd rather use a dedicated hardware device for that, just out o
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Mine is still my daily car music machine. The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore, but I have a USB charger plugged into the lighter socket. That thing's been through hell and back several times, including a stint where it got tossed out a window and left outside for several days before I found it again, and it's still running strong.
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I do. iPod touch with dead battery always plugged into a JBL mini-stereo-alarm clock thingy. Works quite well. A few times per year I plug it into a computer to add/remove some tracks.
iPod not old enough to drink (Score:2)
Happy 21 years to NOMAD Jukebox, it came out in 2000.
Happy 23 years to Diamond Rio, it came out in 1998.
My friend had a NOMAD, it was pretty awesome. All I could afford was a skipless CD player and a binder that held a few hundreds CDs.
YouTube is piracy (Score:3)
Every song is on YouTube and easy to download. Tons of TV and movie clips as well. Only Google can get away with mass piracy.
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Youtube pays royalties on music just like any streaming service.
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Still, the music industry seems barely a shadow of its former self.
oh yeah [visualcapitalist.com].
In the early 1990's, minimum wage was $3.35 per hour and a CD cost $16. Buying an album was a major life decision and there was no way to listen to it beforehand, unless a song or two happened to be on the radio. It totally sucked.
Kids today (Score:1)
No DAB+ radio, awful convoluted software (Score:2)
The software of the iPod is being done in a way to create additional sales, but not for ease and convenience of usage.
In my opinion its success is explained by advertising and monopolization.
Ipod (Score:1)
overshadow the...low storage capacity? (Score:2)
"...a portable media player that promised to overshadow the clunky design and low storage capacity of MP3 players introduced in the mid-1990s."
The iPod was half the capacity of its chief competition when it was introduced. It was higher capacity than flash-based devices but it had an internal hard drive and was much larger than any of those. Of the hard drive-based designs it was only "less clunky" than the Nomad. This is, once again, history rewritten to push Apple's narrative.
The iPod was a new "middle
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By getting large volume rebates and exclusivity deals with 1,8 inches HDD manufacturers, apple put all its competitors providing HDD based mp3 players out of the market, not able to compete on price.
A Slashdot record for lateness (Score:2)
Ipod was way ahed of its time back than (Score:1)
still using one (Score:2)
When I go to the gym, it's nice to have a smaller device to play music.
I still use it in my car as well, using the iPod integration in my Alpine headunit.
We didn't have walkmen or CD/tape players in cars? (Score:2)
Seriously, what's the difference? That you had to plug your iPod into things rather than inserting a CD or cassette? How did that change how we listen to music given that we already had portable devices that played through headphones, and stereos in our cars and homes?
iPods popularized a
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Have you forgotten what a pain in the ass it was to make a mix tape? CDs weren't much better. CDR's were expensive and a 1x burner would take 74 minutes to write one.
Personal media players were revolutionary. Not just for the utility, but they pushed MP3s into the mainstream. Prior to that you'd flip through your huge heavy CD book to find one disc that had one song you liked and 10 that sucked but you still had to pay for.
Normal people don't want to sit at their PC listening to music that they pirated
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I remember my first CD burner. It was a 2x Acer, and I was living in a shitty off-campus apartment that was basically a converted mobile home.
Since the drive had basically no cache or vibration protection, burning a CD meant telling the roommate that he had to sit on the couch for 35 minutes, because even walking across the floor would shake the desk enough to turn the $2 blank disc into a coaster (and we actually used them for such).
Probably not in the majority here... (Score:2)
Wasn't impressed then, not impressed now. (Score:2)
Higher capacity, able to increase at will by swapping disks out, could be used as a backup drive for general data storage, easily swappable batteries so I could have multiple charged sets or even use
Only Apple device I have ever bought (Score:1)
News for nerds (Score:2)
Stuff that happened 20 years ago, when there actually were still news for nerds here.
Diamond Rio Came Out First (Score:2)
20 Years Ago Apple Willfully Infringed.... (Score:1)
There's still a place for standalone audio players (Score:2)
There's still a place for standalone music players. Sansa ZipClip +128GB SDXC +Rockbox FOSS firmware still works great for me. Super small and light. Waaay lighter than a phone.
Mostly Off-Topic ... /and/ still easily listen to my surroundings (since my ears aren't blocked by earbuds or headphones) when hiking, riding a bike/ running etc. Use good headphones when fidelity matters. If you
Music. Bird call ID sounds. Audiobooks. Paired with bone conducting Rockshokz headphones means I can hear the media clearly