Shut the fuck up already. iPods, 9/11, blah blah blah.

I wish we could just go back in time when AOL didn't join the Internet. Back when there was sanity and every other joe schmoe wasn't some self-important blowhard or pundit. Back when you got your teeth kicked in because you used a a computer. Back when a nerd was still a nerd.

Fucking trendwhores make me puke.

A lot of the backlash against the iPod and digital music in general reminds me of the negative reaction given by cinephiles to video stores in the 1980s: Suddenly, any gawk-eyed adolescent could educate him- or herself on the history of movies by renting videocassettes without ever setting foot in a smelly arthouse theater, belonging to a college film society, or subscribing to Cahiers du Cinema. Even if you lived in Bumfuck, North Dakota, you could probably find a copy of The Magnificient Ambersons or Seven Samurai on the back shelves of the local mom'n'pop video store (or even its soulless corporate equivalent).

With iTunes and other digital music stores, average listeners can expand their understanding and appreciation of music in the comfort and privacy of their homes, without spending hours roaming through the local big box retailer or indie record shop (assuming, of course, one exists in your town). When I first bought my iPod, I deliberately avoided the iTunes store. (And I won't argue with folks who suggest that there are plenty of good reasons not to buy music online.) Gradually, however, I started buying individual tracks of songs I liked but would never buy as part of the cost of an entire CD. Within a few months I was buying full albums, mostly by artists I probably never would have bought in my pre-iPod life. Three years ago I would've never imagined myself as the kind of person who'd listen to MF Doom, Pavement, or Willie Nelson (let alone all three within the space of fifteen minutes), but I am now. I'm also much more likely to listen to individual albums all the way through, which is something that I almost never did in the Walkman era (and puts the lie to the notion that MP3 players make their users jittery and indecisive).

Oh, and finally: I agree completely with the poster who observes that it's impossible to catch ADD or OCD from your iPod. There is a tremendous gap between not being able to go outside because of crippling irrational fears and not being able to put together a killer roots-rock playlist to listen to on the Muni.

Like other correspondents, I find that smart playlists offer one corrective to excessive repeats. The notes field can also be used for informal tags, which helps.

As for fidelity, if I had a couple of hours every day to sit in front of a good system with a turntable playing 180g imports, well sure I'd do that. But I don't, and having breadth of choice is a nice substitute, especially when I can switch between music and BBC radio podcasts while sitting in traffic. (Satellite radio would be no help, they don't carry FiveLive for a start...)

Two things I don't identify with; I don't download much music (thanks, DRM) and I avoid using it too much at work; not because I couldn't enjoy it, but because having used some variant of portable music player with headphones since 1980, inter alia, my hearing isn't what it might be, and I'm 35.

Not that you should care what I think or do, I'm not a columnist ; )

Since I started listening to a transistor radio in 1968, I have longed for the iPod - I just didn't know it.

I am such a music freak. I'm just wired to get a absolute rush when I hear something that moves me. But I'm not necessarily into the artist - I'm into the song. Certainly with some artists I'll like everything they do, but for nearly 30 years I'd have to buy an album just to get to one song, and some rarities continually eluded me.

When I started using the web at work in the mid-90s, I almost immediately knew that someone was going to make it so that we could download one song at a time and do away with all those expensive, superfluous tracks. I couldn't wait. And lo and behold, along came iTunes. I blissfully started building my own personal radio station.

When I decided this year that I absolutely had to get serious about exercise, I "invested" in a 1GB iPod Shuffle. And without hyperbole, I say it has changed my life. It is the perfect combination of a personal music collection and radio - random, but you know you'll always hear something you love.

I used to have to force myself - and not always successfully - to get out and walk for half an hour. Now I'm out there at least an hour every day, and sometimes I can't resist - can't resist! - going even longer.

So yes, meeting a decades-old longing and solving a persistent and detrimental motivation problem - I would say the iPod is perfect. Yay, Apple!

I can't listen to music that skips. iPods skip. They shouldn't have gotten out of beta testing like that, but they have been generating hits to Apple "How to troubleshoot skipping" web pages for five years now.

The new hard-drive free iPods claim to be skip free, but one has to wonder why they got so famous based on a buggy product that does.

...but most of the complaints in this article pertaining to the ways the iPod supposedly changed music listening for the worse are not the iPod's fault, but rather the author projecting his own problems onto the iPod. Let's take them one at a time:

1. The accessibility of your entire music library makes listening to new music difficult, because you are tempted to skip to other music.

Um, use the hold switch? Problem solved. If you really can't make it all the way through a new album, it's no one's fault but your own. I have over 10000 songs on my current iPod, and I buy what some would consider an unhealthy amount of music, but I still manage to listen to all of my new music all the way through. Owning an iPod certainly has changed my buying habits, and since I got my first one when I was in college (another big influence on my music habits) my music collection has increased exponentially. I'll be the first to admit that I don't listen to all of my new music nearly as rigorously as I did when I was buying a few CDs per month, and my criteria for buying new music have gotten much looser, but I don't consider this a problem. If an album really catches my attention, I'll listen to it just as much as if I were using a CD player; if not, I'll listen to it a few times and put it back in the rotation. Just because the new CDs I buy aren't all "OK Computer"s doesn't mean I can't enjoy them on a more casual level. Besides, this method of collecting music allows me to "rediscover" albums that have been in my collection for awhile but I had never paid much attention to, an experience I find very rewarding. The author's impatience with new music is no fault of the iPod.

2. The ease with which one can acquire music on the web decreases the ability to enjoy new music.

This isn't even a complaint against the iPod, but against the internet as a means of distributing music, and even there it falls flat. Any lack of discrimination is purely the fault of the author. It should be fairly obvious to anyone with a minimum of common sense that hearing one good song by an artist is not a good justification for downloading the artist's entire body of work (1 GB of music because of ONE song you liked? Please). What do I do when I hear a good song? I download that song, and ONLY THAT SONG. Maybe if I'm really digging the song I'll look into the artist's other work before making a judicious purchase or two. Although the author may be correct in believing that using the internet to download ridiculous amounts of music that you only have a passing interest in anyway diminishes the enjoyment of new music, the choice to do so is entirely up to you. With only a little self-control the author could make listening to new music an enjoyable experience again.

Another aspect of this "problem" that is worth mentioning: if you don't like something you downloaded (or you have no intention of listening to it), you can DELETE IT. This may be harder to justify if you actually bought it (which I do for almost all my music), but the author clearly is getting a lot of music that he has little interest in from a variety of sources that don't involve the exchange of money. Nobody's forcing you to keep all of this music, Farhad.

In the technological determinism vs. voluntarism argument (does technology actively change the way we live or is it simply a tool we use for whatever ends we want?), the author puts forth a purely deterministic argument in order to absolve himself of his inadequacies as a music listener. While I won't deny that the iPod has certainly changed the way millions of people listen to music, the idea that the iPod is to be blamed for Mr. Manjoo's problems is absurd. Ironically enough, the device which inspires Mr. Manjoo's fervor contains within it the tools to overcome his concerns, provided they are used correctly. My solution? I make a playlist of "New Music" I have added in the last month (or two, or three), set my iPod on Album Shuffle, and fire up the playlist every once in a while to make sure nothing gets lost in the shuffle (pardon the pun). It may take a little more focus and effort to listen to and apprectiate music in the iPod era but it's certainly managable, and blaming the iPod is a pretty weak argument.