Getting Ready to Play

To hear the music stored on your iPod shuffle, you must attach a sound output device to it. The most common one you might think of is the earbud headphones that were included in the package.

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Before you can play music on a shuffle, you have to put some music on the shuffle. To do that, you first need to install its software; see Chapter 2, "Getting Started with an iPod," for help with that. You also need to load music onto the shuffle, which you probably did as part of configuring it. You can also use a special iTunes tool to fill your shuffle with great tunes (see "Adding Music to an iPod shuffle" on page 82).

To use these, you connect the mini-jack on the earbud cable to the Headphone jack located on the top of the iPod shuffle (see Figure 5.1). When you do so, you'll hear any sound coming from the iPod through the earbuds.

Figure 5.1. It's easy to figure out where to plug headphones into a shuffle because there is only one option.

Although you are likely to use earbuds or other headphones with an iPod shuffle, those are certainly not the only audio output devices through which you can play a shuffle's music. For example, you can also connect this jack to powered speakers to play its music on those speakers. Using an adapter, you can also connect the shuffle to a home stereo receiver, as you will learn in Chapter 8, "Using an iPod with a Home Stereo or Car Stereo."