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How to Extend Your iPod Battery

By: John Taylor

With the increased battery life of the modern iPod's, there are still some things that you can do to increase the life of your iPod. These simple tips will help increase the battery life of your iPod so that you don't have to go through the hassle of a dead battery.

Pausing vs. standby
Because much of the power consumed by hard-disk iPods (not the Nano or Shuffle) spins the disk, press Pause when you leave the player unattended. Left playing in default mode, the iPod will run until the battery is drained.

However, you might think you have turned it off, when you've actually entered a standby mode. The way Play/Pause is engineered on the click dial, if you press down until the screen goes dark, the iPod may be in a paused standby mode (not Pause), which uses more power. To verify that the unit is in Pause mode, press the middle button. When the screen lights up, look in the upper-left corner for dual bars (Pause), not the triangle (Play). To cut power totally, flip the Hold switch on the top.

Charging and the temperature
The iPod's fast-charge setting can bring the battery to 80 percent of full power in an hour, however, charging it fully still can take up to 4 hours.

Even when it is turned off, the iPod still uses the battery and will drain completely in two to four weeks of nonuse, depending on the temperature where the iPod is stored. The warmer the area, the quicker the battery charge will dissipate. Accordingly, it's best not to leave the iPod in a vehicle parked in the sun, where temperatures can climb to well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit; even shielding the player in the glove compartment won't keep its battery from discharging quickly.

Backlighting and the equalizer
The backlight feature on iPod's can eat up battery power really quickly. To do without the backlight, choose Settings, Backlight Timer, Off.

The equalizer feature can also use a large amount of power, so if you aren't entertaining a large crowd in an orchestra hall, turning off the iPod's sound equalizer will also preserve battery life. It takes processing power to transform a sound track into an high acoustic sound quality that most users won't notice through the average headphones. To disable the equalizer, select Settings, EQ, Off.

Changing tracks
Rewinding or fast-forwarding uses extra energy, but so does changing tracks via the Previous/Next buttons, as the hard drive turns on to find and open the songs. Similarly, using the device's Shuffle or Random modes, which require frequent hard-disk accesses, will affect your player's battery life.

The iPod sends tracks to its memory cache so it can seamlessly play them while powering down the hard drive. That's great for tracks that are 7MB or smaller (the average length of a single), but podcasts, audiobooks, and other long files need sustained hard-disk access, which can run down your battery. Keep in mind that spoken content can be compressed much more heavily than music, so don't hesitate to use lower bit rates for talk-radio-style podcasts or recompressed audiobooks.

Article Source: http://article-resort.com

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