How to Conserve iPod Battery Life

Posted by David  •  May 23rd, 2006 11:59:06 am - Subscribe | Mood: sleepy | Music: MxPx - Grey Skies Turn Blue

So you charged your Ipod all night and it's now half ways through your day and you only have one bar left on your Ipod. Well I had that problem back when, but now I have learned to conserve my Ipod's Battery Life by following some simple tips.

Update to the Latest Software
Always make sure iPod has the latest software from Apple, as engineers may find new ways to optimize battery performance. For instance, early model iPods without a dock connector benefit from update 1.3 or later. If you are a Mac owner, iPod updates will appear via Software Update. Both Mac and Windows users can download software from the Apple support site for iPod. Once downloaded, put your iPod in its dock or plug it into your computer, then run the update.

Use iPod Regularly
For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month. If you use your iPod infrequently (gasp), you might want to add a reminder to your calendar program.

Hold and Pause
It may seem obvious, but set iPod’s hold switch when you aren’t using it. This will prevent iPod controls from inadvertently waking up iPod and using unnecessary power. Also, if you are not listening to iPod, pause it, or turn it off by pressing the play button for two seconds.

Optimize Your Settings
There are a few features that use your iPod battery more quickly. If you don’t use these features, your iPod will play tunes longer.

Backlight: Setting the backlight to “always on” will significantly reduce your battery life. Only use the backlight when necessary.

Equalizer: Adding EQs to playback uses more of your iPod processor, since they aren’t encoded in the song. Turn EQ off if you don’t use it. If, however, you’ve added EQ to tracks in iTunes, you’ll need to set EQ to “flat” in order to have the effect of “off,” because iPod keeps your iTunes settings intact.

Maximize Your Memory
iPod plays music out of a solid-state memory cache to provide skip-free playback and maximize battery life. iPod spins its hard drive to fill this cache, which uses power. There are a couple of factors which affect how often this happens, and if you minimize these factors, you’ll extend battery life.

Fast Forward: If you fast forward through your playlist, iPod will need to fill its cache more frequently, thus accessing the hard drive more often and using more power. This will decrease overall battery life. By creating great playlists in iTunes that cater to your personal taste, you can decrease your need to fast forward. Using the shuffle feature may also help to minimize your use of the fast forward feature.

Use Compressed Songs: iPod’s cache works most efficiently with songs of average file sizes (less than 9 MB). If your audio files are large or uncompressed (including AIFF or WAV format), you may want to compress them, or use a different compression method, such as AAC or MP3, when importing them into iTunes. Also, consider breaking very long songs or tracks into shorter tracks that have smaller file sizes. If you encode your music at 128 Kbps, your iPod will fill its cache about every 25 minutes.

Let It Breathe
Charging your iPod, iPod nano or iPod shuffle while in certain carrying cases may generate excess heat, which can affect battery capacity. If you notice your iPod gets hot when you charge it, take it out of its case first. iPod Temperate Zone. Your iPod works best from 32° to 95°F. You should store it in environments of -4° to 113°. That’s 0° to 35°C and -20° to 45° for the metrically inclined. Keeping your iPod as near room temperature as possible (22°C) is ideal.

Always Keep In Mind
iPod can play up to 20 hours, iPod nano can play up to 14 hours and iPod shuffle can play up to 12 hours on a full charge at original capacity. Apple runs a number of tests for battery life using songs encoded in various formats, including MP3, AAC and songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. The songs are played continuously through a playlist without interruption, with backlight and equalizer off, using factory default settings.

Source

Apple - Batteries - iPod

Too Late? Need a new Ipod Battery? Get One.

Comments 5  •  May 23rd, 2006 11:59:06 am - Subscribe  •  Tweet this entry | Post a comment

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