(Image credit: Apple) If you're a fan of the first-gen iPod, or if you're too young to have experienced Apple's OG music player and want to know what the fuss was all about, you're going to love what Apple's hidden on its Apple Music website: a fully working iPod.The iPod lives on Apple Music's "page not found" page, and you can control it with your mouse, trackpad or touchscreen to recapture the magic of the music player that changed everything.The library is absolutely massive so I haven't been able to test every tune, but every random selection played the appropriate song (albeit for just over a minute rather than the full track).It's a great way to market Apple Music, but it's also a great reminder of how brilliant Apple's original portable player was.The iPod changed everythingIt's 25 years since the original iPod launched, and everything is different. We rarely rip, mix and burn, and the 1,000 song limit seems impossibly small compared to Apple Music's instant access to 100 million songs. But playing with the virtual iPod has made me smile, because it's reminding me of how excited I was by Apple's game-changing device and its successors.I think it's really hard to overstate how much Apple changed the way we listen to music. I wrote about it earlier this year, saying I wish we'd stuck with iPods: "what Apple did was what Apple does so well. It learned from other people's mistakes and then marketed its own products perfectly. 1,000 songs in your pocket."I've owned pretty much every iPod: 3G, 4G, Nano, Shuffle, Mini, Video, Classic… and I miss their style and simplicity. I've seen people make Walkman emulators for the iPhone Duo; I think that screen would be perfect for an iPod, so I'd love to Apple to make a secret option in the Music app to browse your library with this virtual iPod.Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.And standalone music players are on the rise in popularity — Apple might not bring the iPod back, but there are several new devices that feel inspired by the old Nano and Shuffle designs, and more recently one that looks like a cross between the Classic and a Zune. My colleague Matt Bolton, meanwhile, is convinced that it's time for Apple to bring the Shuffle back in a wireless form. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Contributor Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.
Apple's hidden a fully functional original iPod in the new Apple Music site
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