It has been a while since I have written about music or gadgets, so I thought I would hit both in one go.   So I have a trusty 64GB iPod classic for a fair few years, and loved it, the ability to take a sensible chunk of my music with me – what’s not to like? Although of recent, I’ve not used it as much as the iPod does feel somewhat bulky, I don’t have a handy charger these days as my other devices are all using lightning or micro USB connectors.

So time for an update. Should I go forward with just my iPhone which tends to get changed regularly and pay a hefty premium for a decent chunk of storage every time we upgrade (currently £80 extra to go from 16 to 64GB)? We’d be down to 1 device, but will the battery on the phone have enough juice to cover both the calls I make as well as play music when I’m commuting on the train? Then there is the problem of  iTunes. I love that I can load my iPod without iTunes, but as I have never found an alternate app for loading music.  What is wrong with iTunes – well you try getting it to handle the MP3s from my massive CD collection. Perhaps I should consider an iPod Touch which costs less than 1/2 the price for extra storage and benefit from separating the battery charge question, although I don’t escape iTunes.

Well, I think I have found a good alternate solution, with a cool gadget called a Leef iAccess – it takes a micro SD card and plugs into the Lightning socket. When combined with the leef app, can play music or videos etc straight from the device. So we get one device to carry – my phone; music capacity isn’t a challenge with 64GB storage costing very little in micro SD card terms, and if that isn’t enough then just swap cards. No premium on phone upgrades, no iTunes to load the micro SD card with music. As to the question of power consumption, I think the Leef consumes a bit more power than using phone storage. But can probably be overcome with a power pack case that provides pass through on the Lightening connector – although I’ve yet to prove this.  The iAccess is shaped to support the idea, as it doesn’t to hug the phone’s casing shape wise – so cases aren’t an issue (unlike some of the camera gadgets).

I should warn there is one little trip up to be aware of.  Once the SD card has been accessed by the phone it changes the exFAT some how – presumably so that once it has indexed you music it can create a file and can detect if things change.  As a result when you plug back into your PC, you can’t just drag files back across.  But if you let Windows fix the file system first, then everything is sorted and adding more to the storage is no different to another SD storage.