Jarrod Trainque

5Jul

An iPod accessory I’d like to see: iPod DJ

I was walking around the city listening to music when I came up with the following idea for an iPod accessory. It doesn’t currently exist, but maybe if I put my idea out there, someone will make it.

**Problem:** I have too much music on my iPod. I collect music faster than I can listen to it all. When I listen to my ipod using the “shuffle songs” mode, I often have no idea what I’m listening to. Having to constantly retrieve my iPod to learn the artist/track name is inconvenient and bothersome.

**Proposed solution:** Create a 3rd-party hardware device that uses voice synthesis to periodically “read back” artist and song names. Other features:

* It would allow you to set the frequency of song re-caps. For example, I could set it to only interrupt the music every 3 songs.
* It would allow you to specify whether you want to hear just song names, artist names, album names, or a combination.
* You could also specify if you want the information read before or after a song plays, or randomly.
* It might also provide some basic voiceover data, where applicable, such as the time, or miles run (if being used with the Nike accessory).
* It could contain an “interrupt alarm” which the user could set.
* It could allow the user to select one of 3 or 4 voices to use, and well as reading rate.
* Configurations and settings would be done via the ipod (similar to how the Apple FM receiver attachment works).

I envision it connecting through the data connection on the bottom of an iPod, and be sandwiched between the iPod and the headphones, like so:

iPod DJ connections

Song recaps would be short and formulaic, such as:

*”That was **song3** by **artist3**. Before that we heard **song2** by **artist2**. Starting us off in this set was **song1** by **artist1**. The time is now **time**.”*

What do you think? Are there others out there that would find this useful?

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