Apple have always been famous for one thing - producing user-friendly products. So it's no surprise then that when they decided to venture in to the portable audio market and released the Apple iPod, it soon revolutionized the way we listen to music.

But it's not only the general public who are hot for iPods - more and more singers and musicians are now using ipods onstage to play their backing tracks. Why? because the iPod is small and portable enough to fit in your pocket, yet holds thousands of backing tracks!

A lot of one man acts (and duos and bands) have settled on using the iPod for their backing tracks. It works for them because they need something simple, small and reliable onstage and that's exactly what you get with an iPod. Whether you are seasoned iPod user or just thinking about buying an iPod for use live on stage, for sure you'll have a ton of questions you'll want to ask. Some of the most common questions I receive every day are "How good is the sound quality?", "Can I transfer songs from my computer to my iPod easily?" and "Is it legal to download songs from the internet?".

As an ardent fan of iPods and an iPod user for many years, I hope that this website will help answer a few of those questions and help you understand more about iPods. If you're a singer and want to know how to get the maximum enjoyment possible from these little mini marvels, then read on...!

So, what exactly is an iPod? Well, an iPod can be considered to be like a sort of modern-day Walkman. But instead of inserting cassette tapes with a dozen or so songs, the iPod has a tiny hard disk in it which can hold thousands of songs. There are many types of digital music players (often called mp3 players) which can do this, but the Apple iPod is by far the best known and biggest digital music player in the world.

So why should you buy an iPod?

Well, simple...for one, it can store a massive amount of music (probably your entire CD collection as well as all your backing tracks) in one little pocket-sized machine which is not much bigger than a pack of playing cards. It can connect directly to your PA system and in addition to this, as well as personal listening via ear-phones, it can be easily connected to your home hi-fi unit or your car stereo system - how versatile is that! You can even buy a pair of little speakers for your iPod and take it on holiday with you or take it round to a friends house. Best of all, no matter where you go, you will have your entire CD collection and all your backing tracks in your pocket. Now that's powerful stuff!

And...that's not all your iPod can do. You can also legally download backing track music from the internet and instead of "burning" the songs on to a CD, you can transfer them to your iPod and organize them in to "playlists" to suit your mood, occasion or set list. Imagine having instant access onstage to every single backing track in your repertoire, playing a range of easy listening music during your break or while driving in your car, or having your iPod play3 hours of non-stop dance music at a party. You can even tell your iPod to pick music at "random" and play it, whether it be just random tracks from the thousands of songs on it's hard disk or songs of a particular genre (reggae, rock etc).

As if all that wasn't enough, some iPods can operate like an external hard drive for your computer, enabling you to back up computer files such as documents, emails, photos, etc. To give you an idea, a 20Gb iPod can hold the equivelant of 15,000 floppy discs.

It can also play audio books - it's massive storage capacity means you can easily store the entire text of a book on it rather than having to make do with a CD/cassette abridged version.