Keep your iPod well protected from the external elements like dust or scratches with the help of iPod leather case. After that I recommend going to the Options tab and selecting Two-pass encoding. This gives you better video quality but takes a little while longer to encode. Before you even get to the surface of the iPod, you encounter what could be called its aura. The commercial version of an aura is a brand, and while Apple may be a niche player in the computer market, the fanatical brand loyalty of its customers is legendary. A journalist, Leander Kahney, has even written a book about it, ''The Cult of Mac,'' to be published in the spring. As he points out, that base has supported the company with a faith in its will to innovate -- even during stretches when it hasn't.

Apple is also a giant in the world of industrial design. The candy-colored look of the iMac has been so widely copied that it's now a visual cliché. But the iPod is making an even bigger impression. Bruce Claxton, who is the current president of the Industrial Designers Society of America and a senior designer at Motorola, calls the device emblematic of a shift toward products that are ''an antidote to the hyper lifestyle,'' which might be symbolized by hand-held devices that bristle with buttons and controls that seem to promise a million functions if you only had time to figure them all out. ''People are seeking out products that are not just simple to use but a joy to use.'' Moby, the recording artist, has been a high-profile iPod booster since the product's debut. ''The kind of insidious revolutionary quality of the iPod,'' he says, ''is that it's so elegant and logical, it becomes part of your life so quickly that you can't remember what it was like beforehand.'' Tuesday nights, Andrew Andrew's iParty happens at a club called APT on the spooky, far western end of 13th Street.

They show up at about 10 in matching sweat jackets and sneakers, matching eyeglasses, matching haircuts. They connect their matching iPods to a modest Gemini mixer that they've fitted with a white front panel to make it look more iPodish. The iPods sit on either side of the mixer, on their backs, so they look like tiny turntables. Andrew Andrew changes into matching lab coats and ties. They hand out long song lists to patrons, who take a number and, when called, are invited up to program a seven-minute set. At around midnight, the actor Elijah Wood (Frodo) has turned up and is permitted to plug his own iPod into Andrew Andrew's system. His set includes a Squarepusher song.

Between songs at APT, each Andrew analyzed the iPod. In talking about how hard it was, at first, to believe that so much music could be stuffed into such a tiny object, they came back to the scroll wheel as the key to the product's initial seductiveness. ''It really bridged the gap,'' Andrew observed, ''between fantasy and reality.'' After that just click Encode and wait. Converting Xvid files to Mpeg-4 for the iPod is much faster than converting it to H.264. I encoded a 20 minute episode of American Dad in about 9 minutes and a 45 minute episode of Wanted in about 28 minutes. Not bad ‘eh? The file sizes are pretty close to the original Xvid versions, which is fine with me since I bought the big bad 60 GB iPod. If you want to squeeze every last second from each full charge of your iPod's battery, there's a few tricks you should know. Trick 1: Get 3+ Hours of Video Playback on Your 30GB iPod.