Turning iPod touch into the ultimate music player

Shortcuts, widgets, and better apps make this thing a perfect music companion

The iPod touch may be dead, but it still makes for one helluva music player. I wrote yesterday about my experience trying to use an iPod classic with macOS Monterey and how it drove me to switch over to an iPod touch. I’ve been customizing my iPod touch to be purely for content consumption. Here’s how I did it.

It starts with shortcuts. Shortcuts is a complicated and often frustrating tool. But it is great for adding quick shortcut icons to play music and podcasts. So I’ve created an entire Home Screen page with music and podcasts that I want to play on the fly. With just a tap I can start my Apple Hits playlist or play songs by Shawn Mendes. I can also tap to instantly start the latest episode of Office Ladies. It’s super handy and it’s something you can’t do on any other iPod.

There are also plenty of pre-made shortcuts that you can download from the web and from Apple’s own directory just for music playback. One that’s particularly useful is the MacStories MusicBot shortcut. While it was designed for Apple Music, you can still use it beautifully with your personal offline music library as well. It also offers quick controls like pause.

MusicBot even lets you quickly shuffle your music, search your library, or pick a playlist without ever opening the music app. It’s a very handy tool that you can add to your home screen.

Perhaps the best thing about using the iPod touch as a separate music player is that you can fill the whole thing up with your content and save space on your iPhone or iPad. I’ve downloaded all of my podcasts, every single one of my favorite tv show episodes, and my entire personal music library. iPod touch still syncs beautifully with the Mac but like I mentioned yesterday, you can still download everything right on device if you want to.

If you’re someone who frequently commutes or travels and doesn’t always have access to a strong internet connection, this is really great. If Spotify or Apple Music doesn’t download all of your songs offline on your phone, you might not have anything to listen to on the subway. You might not have enough space on your iPhone to download a movie for a flight. It’s a great little device that takes up almost no space at all.

Another thing that’s particularly great about the iPod touch is widgets. I don’t like to clutter my iPhone’s Home Screen with big widgets. I’m a fan of organizing my icons in a balanced and simple way. But on a device that’s just for my content, widgets are great. I’ve placed a huge music widget right on the Home Screen to quickly jump into recently played songs and playlists. You can do the same with podcasts or tv if you want as well.

There are two other small things that you should also do with a content-only iPod touch. One is background sounds. If you didn’t know the iPod touch has built-in white noise and background sounds and you can place a button for the right on the Home Screen with shortcuts. The second is an Apple TV remote. It’s handy to add to the Home Screen in case you want another remote around that you can easily grab.

At the end of the day, this kind of iPod touch isn’t for everyone. Not everybody wants to carry around a second device or worry about downloading content offline. But there are plenty of people who do and the iPod touch is the best way to do it.

Note: If you can’t get your hands on an iPod touch or you just have some old iPhones lying around, you can do the exact same thing with those. But they still aren’t iPods and they aren’t nearly as thin, light, and small. That’s the real charm here.