KiDrOck80 said:
I know this was posted elsewhere on the forums, but I'm not gonna bother searching for it... The test Apple recommends to verify the battery life of your iPod goes a bit like this:
[1] Transfer a playlist to your iPod with a single 4-minute 128Kbps song in it.
[2] Plug in your iPod to an outlet.
[3] Set your iPod to replay the song.
[4] Start playing the song at medium volume. <-- You don't have to have anything coming out of the audio port.
[5] About 10 seconds into the song, disconnect your iPod from the outlet.
[6] Let the song loop through until the battery life is drained. If the battery lasts around 10 hours (can vary by a few minutes), then your iPod has a working battery.
Now here are some tips I thought up and read online and from magazines that help optimize your battery life -- BTW: I've posted them in the past, but they depended on the technology and iPod firmware at the time.
#1 Reduce the contrast on your iPod. You didn't buy an iPod to stare at what song you are playing.
#2 Turn off the equalizer. When the equalizer is enabled, the iPod has to integrate each frequency setting appropriately, taking up battery life. If need be, get better earphones.
#3 Only use the backlight when necessary. When you're done using it, hold down the menu button for 1.5 seconds to turn it off. If you're worried about saving seconds of battery life on your iPod, do that rather than letting it turn off by itself.
#4 Compress your music to save battery life. That may be obvious, but your iPod is not the center of your musical lifestyle. It's a music player for when you can use it on your own time. So it isn't necessary to have CD-quality songs on your iPod. Compress the songs down to 128Kbps or lower.
#5 Do NOT constantly run the Hard Drive to transfer songs. If you start up the Hard Drive somewhere in the middle of the playlist, do not keep switching back and forth through songs. Also, once you do select a song in a playlist, do not select a song in front of the current selection until the Hard Drive has shut down (wait 10 seconds).
#6 If you encode songs at a high bitrate, do not play songs over the limited track time the iPod will allow, as there may not be sufficient amounts of RAM to handle certain lengthy tracks. The Hard Drive will keep spinning and your iPod may only get a few minutes of life.
#7 Avoid constantly skipping through a track, as the iPod has to consume more energy to match your skipped position.
#8 Try to keep track of how many minutes of music your iPod can transfer to the RAM from the Hard Drive in one spin of the Hard Drive. For instance, at 64Kbps AAC, I can get a little over 40 minutes of music (an entire short album) with one spin of the Hard Drive. So if I want to create a favorites playlist, I may want to transfer 40 minutes of 64Kbps AAC files and ONLY 64Kbps files to the iPod for that particular playlist.
#9 If you have more songs on the playlist, which will require an additional Hard Drive spin-up, the Hard Drive will actually spin up a few seconds before the last RAM-allocated song has ended (occurs with iPod OS 1.2.x). If you decide to scroll through your iPod at that point and start playing songs in another playlist, you have just wasted a whole spin-up of the Hard Drive.
#10 Keep track of the lastest iPod software and hardware issues and solutions to each, as well as the latest available firmware for your iPod. I also recommend restoring the iPod, once in a while, to refresh any junk you want removed from the iPod, as well as give it a fresh start.
Your iPod's battery will improve, most likely anywhere from an hour to three extra hours, depending on how well the above suggestions are followed.
