Does anyone know how to increase the battery play time of an iPod Mini?

Answer 1

Apple is really cheap with its batteries and so you should buy a broken ipod with a working battery of ebay and replace it with yours and wallah a new battery. Apple sucks.

Answer 2

Wow! Apple has a lot of advice about this! From Apple:
Paying attention to just a few common sense pointers will pay off with a longer battery lifespan and battery life for your iPod. The most important thing is to keep your iPod out of the sun or a hot car (even the glove box). Heat will degrade your battery’s performance the most.

Some Terms You Need to Understand

“Battery life” means the time your iPod will run before it must be recharged (sometimes this is also called “playtime” or “runtime”). “Battery lifespan” means the total amount of time your battery will last before it must be replaced.


iPod Temperate Zone. Your iPod works best from 32° to 95°F. You should store it in environments of -4° to 113°. That’s 0° to 35°C and -20° to 45° for the metrically inclined. Keeping your iPod as near room temperature as possible (22°C) is ideal.

Update to the Latest Software

Always make sure iPod has the latest software from Apple, as engineers may find new ways to optimize battery performance. For instance, early model iPods without a dock connector benefit from update 1.3 or later. If you are a Mac owner, iPod updates will appear via Software Update. Both Mac and Windows users can download software from the Apple support site for iPod. Once downloaded, put your iPod in its dock or plug it into your computer, then run the update software.

Use iPod Regularly

For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month. If you use your iPod infrequently (gasp), you might want to add a reminder to your calendar program.

Extend Your Battery Life

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

Hold and Pause

It may seem obvious, but set iPod’s hold switch when you aren’t using it. This will prevent iPod controls from inadvertently waking up iPod and using unnecessary power. Also, if you are not listening to iPod, pause it, or turn it off by pressing the play button for two seconds.

Optimize Your Settings

There are a few features that use your iPod battery more quickly. If you don’t use these features, your iPod will play tunes longer.
Backlight: Setting the backlight to “always on” will significantly reduce your battery life. Only use the backlight when necessary.
Equalizer: Adding EQs to playback uses more of your iPod processor, since they aren’t encoded in the song. Turn EQ off if you don’t use it. If, however, you’ve added EQ to tracks in iTunes, you’ll need to set EQ to “flat” in order to have the effect of “off,” because iPod keeps your iTunes settings intact.

Maximize Your Memory

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

Fast Forward:

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

Use Compressed Songs:

iPod’s cache works most efficiently with songs of average file sizes (less than 9 MB). 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 128 Kbps, your iPod will fill its cache about every 25 minutes.

iPod can play up to 20 hours, iPod nano can play up to 14 hours and iPod shuffle can play up to 12 hours on a full charge at original capacity. Apple runs a number of tests for battery life using songs encoded in various formats, including MP3, AAC and songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. The songs are played continuously through a playlist without interruption, with backlight and equalizer off, using factory default settings.

Charge Cycles

A properly maintained iPod battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs.

Let It Breathe

Charging your iPod, iPod nano or iPod shuffle while in certain carrying cases may generate excess heat, which can affect battery capacity. If you notice your iPod gets hot when you charge it, take it out of its case first.

;-D Got all that? Enjoy your iPod!