Paying attention to just a few common sense pointers will pay off with a longer battery life for your iPod and longer lifespan overall. The most important thing is to keep your iPod out of the sun and out of a hot car even the glove box. Heat will degrade your battery's performance the most.

The following tips will help you understand your iPod battery, as well as safeguard it. But no matter how carefully you use the battery the reality is that, one day, it will give up its ghost.

How To Extend Your iPod Battery Life

If you want to extend the battery life of your iPod for any given charge cycle, you can conserve power by following the tips outlined below.

1. Hold and Pause

Set your iPod's 'Hold' switch when you're not using it. This will prevent iPod controls from inadvertently waking up and using unnecessary power. Also, if you're not listening to your iPod, pause it or turn it off by pressing the 'Play' button for two seconds.

2. Optimise settings

There are some features that use up your iPod battery more quickly. If you don't use these features, your iPod will play longer tunes.

3. Backlight

Setting the backlight to always on will significantly reduce your battery life. Only use the backlight when necessary.

4. Equalizer

Adding EQs to playback uses more of your iPod's processor, as they aren't encoded in the song. Turn EQ off if you don't use it. If you've added EQ to tracks in iTunes, you'll need to set EQ to flat in order to get the effect of off, as the iPod keeps your iTunes settings intact.

5. Maximise memory

Your iPod plays music out of solid-state memory cache to provide skip-free playback and maximise battery life. It spins its hard drive to fill the cache, which uses power. There are a couple of factors that affect how often this happens, and if you minimise these factors, you'll extend battery life.

6. Fast forward

If you fast forward through your playlist, your iPod will need to fill its cache more frequently, accessing the hard drive more often and using more power. This will decrease overall battery life. By creating great playlists in iTunes that caters your personal taste, you can decrease your need to fast forward. Use the shuffle feature to help minimise your use of the fast forward feature.

7. Uncompressed songs

The iPod's cache works most efficiently with songs of average file sizes less than 9MB. If your audio files are large or uncompressed including AIFF or WAV format, you may want to compress them, or use a different compression method, such as AAC or MP3, when importing them into iTunes. Also, consider breaking very long songs or tracks into shorter tracks that have smaller file sizes. If you encode your music at 128kbps, your iPod will fill its cache about every 25 minutes.