It's never a pleasant experience to have your iPod run out of juice in the middle of an enjoyable music-listening session. To make matters worse, iPods and most of the other media players today, come with built-in battery packs. So you can't simple replace the battery with a new one easily. But there are ways to extend your iPod's battery life. Here's how.

Tip #1: Go easy on the extra features

If you don't need them, leave them. The iPod touch's Wi-Fi capability, games, apps, and image or video playback require extra processing power. The same applies to every other player. Turning off features and audio enhancements such as the equalizer reduces the strain on the processor.

Tip #2: Tweak the display backlight settings

Reducing the screen brightness at a lower level will help to lower power consumption. On iPods, it is a good idea to turn off the Auto-Brightness as it will increase the brightness automatically. Reducing the time it takes for the touchscreen to go into idle mode helps to prolong the battery life as well.

Tip #3: Treat your battery gently

Batteries are very sensitive to temperature. Therefore, it is crucial to keep your player well-ventilated while charging as the process can produce quite a fair amount of heat. If you are in a cold country, try to keep your iPod warm during operation as low temperatures will decrease the battery's performance.

A common misconception is that batteries should be recharged only when they run dry. Lithium-ion polymer batteries such as the ones found inside iPods do not suffer from memory effects, and in fact, will last longer on partial charges. Fully draining the battery actually reduces its lifespan significantly.

Tip #4: Avoid MP3 encoding overkill

Most people can live happily with the 128Kbps MP3. Higher bitrate-encoded MP3s, WAV and Apple Lossless (M4A) tracks, even variable bitrate files, may sound slightly better to some people. But these require more decoding/processing power, which drains the battery faster.

The type of player that is affected most by the bitrate settings would be hard drive-based players like the iPod classic, which spins up the hard drive in order to copy audio data into a small cache. Flash memory based-players are still affected by the difference in bitrates, but to a lesser extent.

Tip #5: Use more efficient headphones

Headphones can play a large role in conserving battery power. An efficient earphone requires less power from the player's amplifier to drive the same volume, compared to an inefficient pair.

What you should be looking for are earphones with a low impedance and high sensitivity. Impedance is expressed in ohms, where a higher value means it's harder to power. Sensitivity is the measure of how loud it is, and is usually measured in dB/mW. A general guide would be to look out for a pair that has an impedance of 20 Ohms and has a sensitivity of 110 dB/mW.