Launched on October 2001 as portable music device, Apple Ipod today, come in a range of varied shapes and sizes with some of the most advanced features to offer. The group of some of the most choicest music gadgets found world wide come with variety of functionalities. Along with the portable HDD-based flagship model of an iPod classic, there are ones in the range of iPod touch. Today, if there are ones like video iPod nano, with ability to show videos, there are iPod shuffle; simpler yet powerful enough to perform.

While the range of current iPod classic models play files saved on to an internal hard drive, there are other models that run using removable flash memory. Thus resulting in small size and increased ease of portability. While connected to a computer, these portable gadgets get recognised as external data storage devices.

To facilitate better listening experience Apple offers iTunes software along with the bundle. iTune software aids in easy transfer of music files to the iPods. The software also comes with a program that creates music library on the computer from which the data is gathered. In addition to playing and transferring songs from computer to the portable device, iTune software can burn and rip music from a CD as well. The same software also aids in fast sending of photos, games, and videos to iPods.

While an iPod is designed to play mp3 files, the series of these digital audio players also supports AAC/M4A, Audible audiobook, protected AAC, AIFF, WAVand Apple Lossless audio file formats. Now watch your photo in any of JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, or even in PNG image file formats.

Several newer versions of iPod can also play videos in MPEG-4 (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC) and QuickTime format. Now if you are in a fix over playing a music in Microsoft's WMA audio format just add a converter nowadays packaged with Windows version of iTunes. To play MIDI files also, one can convert the same with the help of iTunes' 'advanced' menu. Once after installing a customised firmware onto the iPod, files in any of the open-source audio formats like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC can be played too.

About the Author

Adam Caitlin is expert author of Telecommunication industry.He is writing useful insights and articles about laptops, sim free phones and gaming consoles.