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IPods for idiots

Charles Spencer

Wednesday, 9th April 2008

It is three years since I last wrote about my iPod.

So it was with some alarm that I took a call from Kathy, the lovely lady at Past Perfect, the nostalgia label that offers brilliantly remastered CDs of the music of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties ranging from jazz to French chanson, and from the dance music of the Twenties to the hits of the second world war. I’ve written about the label here before, readers have snapped up its albums with gay abandon, and I have never heard from a single dissatisfied customer.

Now Past Perfect has had the brilliant idea of putting its entire back catalogue of lovingly compiled albums on to an iPod Nano. There are more than 1,376 tracks ranging from Billie Holiday to the Andrews Sisters, Count Basie to Cole Porter, Fats Waller to Beniamino Gigli. And while I reckon it would cost about £600 to buy the entire back catalogue on CD the fully loaded iPod is available for just £249.97.

Reluctant to rush into print after my previous experience, I’ve been vigorously road-testing the Past Perfect iPod for the past two months. It hasn’t jammed once, recharges like a dream, and even tells you the time. Technology has moved on since my last iPod experience — the Nano is smaller than a credit card and not much thicker and you get reproductions of Past Perfect’s stylish album covers on the full-colour screen, so you can leaf through the virtual records and pick out the one you want to play just as if it were a real LP. Indeed the neatness and ingenuity of the tiny machine is a pleasure in its own right.

The sound quality is apparently significantly better than you will get by downloading the songs at iTunes. The default quality for encoding is 128kbps while Past Perfect offers 224kbps. The lovely Kathy also sent me two pages of absolutely idiot-proof instructions and I’m sure she’ll do the same for you if you ask her nicely.

Time speeds by as you sample the portable delights on offer. You could start for instance with Noël Coward and Gertie Lawrence in Private Lives (strange how potent clipped accents are), move on to some classic swing and bebop and end your session with a blast of George Formby whose cheeky inanity never fails to cheer me up.