

Apple Announces New iPod shuffle - nickb
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/03/11ipod.html

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leonroy
For the techies here: At first I was wondering how the hell they fit a text to
speech engine in that little package - but in the vid they explain that the
new shuffle's VoiceOver feature uses a different voice for windows and mac.
Ahhhh. So it seems that they must be getting the OS to do the text to speech,
store the output as little audio files alongside each track/playlist and then
play them back when the user requests it.

Typical Apple - simple, clever solution to a seemingly complex problem.

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jonursenbach
So they're using up more space on what's already terribly limited. Incredible!

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jws
2 seconds of song title information in a 200 second song. Irrelevant!

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electromagnetic
Convert it to AAC and you'll double the storage space of the Shuffle. Their
estimates are based on MP3 and I know from experience that AAC can store a
song with equal quality (well the same output quality from an earphone).

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jonknee
The first music player that talks to you? You don't even have to look outside
of Apple's own product line up to see that's not true, the Nano has it.

<http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/specs.html>

"Spoken menus allow listeners to hear many of the names of menus, song titles,
and artists without viewing the screen."

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jcl
Well, technically, any player running Rockbox (iPod, iRiver, Archos, Sansa,
etc.) can do it -- and probably did it earlier, too.

<http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/VoiceHowto>

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yef
So you have to use their earbuds? Hrm.

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tptacek
Where do you see that?

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there
they moved the play controls to the headphone cable and removed them from the
ipod itself. if you don't use their crappy earbuds, you have no way of
skipping songs or pausing.

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cake
That's what is bothering me with this stuff.

You just can't put your own bigger headphones and use the Shuffle properly.
Suppose you break the earbuds, you must buy some new ones to Apple to skip the
tracks !

It's not the quality I expect from Apple products, just a "buy and dispose"
thing.

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10ren
_incredibly popular shuffle feature_

I agree that the shuffle iPod itself is very popular but do many people
actually use the shuffle _feature_?

I like the shuffle because it's small and light-weight - even my first
generation one. Which has 512MB - my factor-of-ten improvement rule means it's
approximately time to upgrade.

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karmaVS
Almost all the time I use my iPod (or iTunes), it is being used with shuffle…

This is pretty standard behaviour, from what I’ve seen. A _lot_ of people use
the shuffle feature.

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10ren
Usability is a serious concern, because most navigation is done with one
button, Click, Double-click, Triple-click. Click-and-hold.
<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3458> The one exception is stepping through
playlists - _with the volume controls_. It's modal (modeful?), so you have to
track of the state of the device to know the meaning of the controls.

This is terrible UI design, and very unlike Apple. A symptom of Steve's
absence?

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gamache
_Apple Announces Incredible New iPod shuffle_

 _iPod shuffle is based on Apple’s incredibly popular shuffle feature_

 _Pod shuffle is the smallest music player in the world and is incredibly easy
to clip to almost anything_

This all sounds pretty credible to me. Basically, now it can use playlists and
it can use text-to-speech to tell you what song is playing.

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ganley
If they could cram an accelerometer in there, then you could pick a song by
tapping on it a la songtapper.com ...

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sahaj
having another active device is probably a large enough drain on the battery
to reduce the play time significantly.

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jonursenbach
When is Apple going to stop embedding Quicktime movies and move to streaming
Flash like the rest of the world has?

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hexis
I wouldn't hold your breath.

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kirubakaran
_I wouldn't hold_ your _breath._

If you did, won't that be murder? :)

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TweedHeads
Innovation at Apple never ends. Bravo!

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windsurfer
Except... didn't the nano have text-to-speech? And I've been using this
feature with rockbox for at least 2 years...

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cubicle67
I think the comment was meant as sarcasm

