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I believe my home to be haunted. Honestly. On rare occasions, I have heard a girl crying late at night when everything is quiet and the windows are shut. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s undeniable when it does. The first time my iPod Shuffle stopped playing was at home as I was on the couch reading. Suddenly, no more music. It just stopped abruptly in the middle of a song. My first thought was that our ghost had taken up poltergeisting for more attention. However, the iPod was displaying the exact same behaviour while I listened to it at work, and I was pretty sure the ghost wasn’t commuting with me.

It’s a sudden cut, exactly as if one had pressed pause in the middle of a song. Normally, when you hit the play/pause button for a break in the music, a blinking green light flashes at the top of the iPod to indicate its status. In this case, no light. In fact, pressing the play/pause button in this circumstance actually causes the Shuffle’s green light to blink, as if it had been paused. But there is no music. So you’re basically pausing…

THE VOID.

Pressing play/pause once again doesn’t restart the music. The light stops blinking, indicating that it has left paused mode, yet not a sound eeks into the earbuds. It’s like being caught in MP3 limbo: you can pause and play your music files, but you can’t listen to them. It’s a RIAA wet dream.

Calling Apple support is just as useful as reading the manual: press start/pause three times fast to reset the playlist. If that doesn’t work, turn it on and off three times fast to effectively reboot the iPod. While either of these solutions do succeed in getting the Shuffle to work again, they also carry the burden of resetting the playlist. Thus, the playlist will either start over from its initial place or a new one will be generated. Either way, you’re either going to end up listening to songs which have just made their way into your ears or will have to skip over them to hear the new ones. So not only did I have to deal with this annoying bug that no amount of Shuffle updates have succeeded in eliminating, but I have to subject myself to my second gripe, which is not good.

And sometimes, late at night, when the moon is dark and the iPod is silent, you can hear the melancholy cries from within that Quebec City home…

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- You know that Pay No Mind is the track that follows Loser, but what will it play next? Nitemare Hippy Girl? Soul Suckin’ Jerk?

- You just listened to Sweetness Follows, Man On The Moon, and Find The River. You’d really like to hear Drive right now. Can it read your mind? Here comes the next song: Everybody Hurts? Hmm…

- You just listened to Evenflow, but can it read your moods? Because Black sure could help nurture that self-loathing feeling right about now.

Yeah, there was something both daring and cosmic when listening to your CDs out of their pre-planned order. It’s that magic the Shuffle’s mantra was trying to channel. But no matter how many times you did, you could always return order to your musical universe by resetting the tunes back to their prescribed placement. Or skip over to the track number you wanted to listen to. The songs you wanted were never really out of reach.

But finding the song you want on an iPod Shuffle is exactly like navigating through the Titanic wreckage without James Cameron.

You have a good idea what’s in there: the rooms, the artifacts, the coral… but if you’re looking for the crate of elastic cords which was being transported in the cargo area for Kuyper, P.C. & Co., you’d best have James around to tell you where to go; if not, you’ll probably end up sorting through crates of synringe fittings shipped by American Express Co, or one of Downing, R.F. & Co crates of iron jacks. You’ll eventually reach the elastic cords, but not after some major blind poking around.

Yes, there are two modes on the iPod Shuffle, Virginia. The Shuffle mode and the Play in Order mode. Play in Order will play a song playlist in a order (duh) as defined in iTunes: track number, artist name, play count, whatever suits your fancy-wancy. So, one can get to the desired songs easier right? I say “sort of.” What if I’m listening to Autour de Lucie on a playlist sorted by artist, and get a hankering for some Postal Service. I’m still going to have to weed through Beck, Band of Horses, Buck 65, the Decemberists, the Flaming Lips, Hawksley Workman, Jeff Buckley and Malajube before reaching Jimmy Tamborello’s dreamy beats. I just might get bored in the meantime and start making out with someone to fill the void.

Yes, one could put less songs on the Shuffle to find the songs easier. But then what’s the point of having bigger disk space if you can’t carry more tunes because the more tunes you carry the longer it takes to find them?

The irony of it all is that if I owned any other type of MP3 player, I probably would listen to its musical content in random mode 75% of the time anyway. But that 25% chunk of my life where I would like to reach a song, artist, or album on a whim, but can’t, is irritating enough to knock my iPod Shuffle love down another peg.

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So I would take my Shuffle to work, listening to it on the bus, casually eyeing people around me to see if they noticed I was sporting the distinctive white wires of the iPod’s earbud headphones, thus considering me cooler than they were. The snug presence of the buds would remain right into my office space where I would settle in, pour myself a beverage, and prepare to tackle my day, as they stayed sunk into my ears, resonanting with the sounds of my favourite music artists.

The one day I was tired of feeling the bulge of the diminutive speakers, I got the bright idea of stuffing my iPod into my work computer, copying the files to my hard drive, and spare my eardrums from the decibel spike by listening to the music from the computer’s speaker. When I plugged the Shuffle into the USB port, the computer asked me if I wanted to “assign” this iPod to this computer. If so, the contents of the iPod would be erased.

I had been introduced to Apple’s Digital Rights Management system.

By glancing over my current iTunes library, I would roughly estimate it being made up of 80% RIAA free music. Most of the music I listen to comes from scowering the Internet to find original and unknown indie artists who offer free MP3s of their work. Then, if I like it, I’ll buy the CD. I don’t buy MP3s. In this respect, the iTunes Music Store has always been an afterthought of mine. I had never really been confronted to Apple’s FairPlay DRM and its limitative playlist exporting and whatnot.

Imagine my shock when my iPod, which I owned, didn’t allow me to transfer music, which I had either bought or had obtained with consent from the artist, onto another machine. I had no intentions of distributing the songs across a P2P network or upload them to a Carracho server for users to download. The idea was just like bringing a CD over to a friend’s house to listen to it. Only I wanted to listen to a lot of music from a lot of different artists without having to lug 25 compact disc cases with me, which is the whole point of owning an MP3 player in the first place.

It was doubly frustrating because most of the music which is on my Shuffle isn’t even subject to the RIAA’s itchy woolen blanket of rights protection, one of the reasons why Apple built this stupid “feature” in. How dare Apple assume that I only listen to RIAA member music?

Sure, I could have just activated the “Enable Disk Use” option, copy files onto the iPod’s disk portion, and transfer them to the new computer upon arrival, but then I couldn’t listen to the music on the Shuffle on my way over to work. The model I have is the 512MB one, which contains about six hours of music. So even if I enabled 50 percent of the disk to be used as storage, I could only get about three hours of tunes on the work computer before stuffing the earbuds back into my head if I didn’t want to hear the same songs over again, which was kind of against the purpose.

Obviously, I eventually found out about applications like iGadget and Broken Helix, which allowed me to have my Shuffle act how I wanted it to act. But had I paid for the device, further irritation would have overcome me since I would have had to look to third party software to overcome such garbage.

That was the earliest blow to my enjoyment of my iPod Shuffle. It felt incredibly embarassing to tell someone that I couldn’t let him listen to a few good tracks I had because the device wouldn’t let me.

Part two next week.

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