Paying attention to just a few common sense pointers will pay off with a longer battery lifespan and battery life for your iPod. The most important thing is to keep your iPod out of the sun or a hot car (even the glove box). Heat will degrade your battery’s performance the most.

Some Terms You Need to Understand

“Battery life” means the time your iPod will run before it must be recharged (sometimes this is also called “playtime” or “runtime”). “Battery lifespan” means the total amount of time your battery will last before it must be replaced.

Update to the Latest Software

Always make sure iPod has the latest software from Apple, as engineers may find new ways to optimise battery performance. For instance, early model iPods without a dock connector benefit from update 1.3 or later. Using iTunes 7.4 or later, you can update your iPod with the latest software. Put your iPod in its dock or plug it into your computer and iTunes will notify you if a new update is available.

Use iPod Regularly

For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month. If you use your iPod infrequently (gasp), you might want to add a reminder to your calendar program.

Extend Your Battery Life

If you want to extend the battery life of your iPod for any given charge cycle, you may conserve power by following these tips.

Hold and Pause

It may seem obvious, but set iPod’s hold switch when you aren’t using it. This will prevent iPod controls from inadvertently waking up iPod and using unnecessary power. Also, if you are not listening to iPod, pause it, or turn it off by pressing the play button for two seconds.

Optimise Your Settings

There are a few features that use your iPod battery more quickly. If you don’t use these features, your iPod will play tunes longer.

• Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi consumes power even if you are not using its features to connect to a network. You can turn it off to save power. Go to Settings > General > Network > Wi-Fi.
• Backlight: Setting the backlight to “always on” will significantly reduce your battery life. Only use the backlight when necessary.
• Equalizer: Adding EQs to playback uses more of your iPod processor, since they aren’t encoded in the song. Turn EQ off if you don’t use it. If, however, you’ve added EQ to tracks in iTunes, you’ll need to set EQ to “flat” in order to have the effect of “off”, because iPod keeps your iTunes settings intact.

Maximise Your Memory

iPod plays music out of a solid-state memory cache to provide skip-free playback and maximise battery life. iPod spins its hard drive to fill this cache, which uses power. There are a couple of factors which affect how often this happens, and if you minimise these factors, you’ll extend battery life.

• Fast Forward: If you fast forward through your playlist, iPod will need to fill its cache more frequently, thus accessing the hard drive more often and using more power. This will decrease overall battery life. By creating great playlists in iTunes that cater to your personal taste, you can decrease your need to fast forward. Using the shuffle feature may also help to minimise your use of the fast forward feature.
• Use Compressed Songs: iPod’s cache works most efficiently with songs of average file sizes (less than 9MB). If your audio files are large or uncompressed (including AIFF or WAV format), you may want to compress them, or use a different compression method, such as AAC or MP3, when importing them into iTunes. Also, consider breaking very long songs or tracks into shorter tracks that have smaller file sizes. If you encode your music at 128 Kbps, your iPod will fill its cache about every 25 minutes.