Podshanking: Hot Pod on Pod Action

The people over at The Mod Gods have come out with a new way to make on-the-fly copies of music on your friend’s iPod, and they’ve dubbed it PodShanking. Here’s the summary definition from the article: ”Podshanking: to transfer music between iPods directly via headphone ports with a minimum of equipment and preparation. Better solutions are certainly out there and the best solution of all is if we could simply ask for the features we want and have them built into the next MP3 player we buy. Until that time our captors are making us more self-sufficient and inventive. PodShank in public. Be visible. Mod.”

Unfortunately, if you have a 4G (Fourth Generation) iPod, the only way to PodShank is with a 3rd party product like the Griffin iTalk, which means the audio quality is limited, whereas if you have an older iPod, you can load up Linux on it and use PodZilla to make a higher quality recording. The other downside of this procedure is that the recording happens in real time, so make sure you and your friend schedule a dinner / date over which to safely PodShank.

A commenter named Jeff who neglected to confirm the comment asks, ”What possible use could this have other than stealing music?” Lots.  First off, there is a plethora of music freely available online that is not under any sort of DRM or copyright restrictions, and if you actually read the Podshanking post over at The Mod Gods, you’ll find that they discuss using this method to copy just such an album.  Podcasts, voice recordings, etc…