iPod

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   Perhaps this is not quite the right place to post this, but...
Does anyone have an iPod and what is their opinion of it (particularly for listening to prog rock and other complex music such as classical music with many instruments)?
I am seriously tempted to get one but would like to know if they are really as good as some people are saying.
I met someone who has around 10,000 songs on his iPod and takes it everywhere, including work. He told me that he just plugs the iPod into his HIFI at home instead of putting on a CD these days, and his CD rack is just gathering dust.
I would be grateful for any good or bad comments from those of you who own one of these things.

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Fitzcarraldo Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 30 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1835	Topic: iPod Posted: May 05 2004 at 13:24
	Perhaps this is not quite the right place to post this, but... Does anyone have an iPod and what is their opinion of it (particularly for listening to prog rock and other complex music such as classical music with many instruments)? I am seriously tempted to get one but would like to know if they are really as good as some people are saying. I met someone who has around 10,000 songs on his iPod and takes it everywhere, including work. He told me that he just plugs the iPod into his HIFI at home instead of putting on a CD these days, and his CD rack is just gathering dust. I would be grateful for any good or bad comments from those of you who own one of these things.

Fitzcarraldo Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 30 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1835	Posted: May 16 2004 at 00:46
	No member of these forums owns an iPod! I can't believe it!

Joren Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: February 07 2004 Location: Netherlands Status: Offline Points: 6667	Posted: May 16 2004 at 04:47
	er... what is it?

Certif1ed Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 08 2004 Location: England Status: Offline Points: 7559	Posted: May 22 2004 at 17:12
	The main problem with iPods is that the white headphones are very distinctive, and thieves have been targetting them. http://www.Tomshardware.com reckons that the Creative device is better - take a look over there, as Tom's is a good place for tech reviews and recommendations.

Dusanyu Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Newbie Joined: May 29 2004 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 19	Posted: May 29 2004 at 01:08
	I dont like to be locked into one format. Dont get me wrong the Ipod is a grate Device Sterophile Magizne gave it digitalsourcereviews/934/">Glowin Reviues.But the I-Pod convenently Limits you to eather MP3 or the AAC format that is used in Apple iTunes music store. Personly I find both Codecs lacking as compared to the Open Source OGG Vorbis codec as the say the prrof is in the pugging you can actuly ogg/vorbis/listen.html">Hear the diffrance Bewtween ogg, wma8, MP3 LAME 3.91, and MP3 Pro. Given this data when i went to purchace a Portable Audio player I went with the iRiver H14, as it is a harddrive based player with suport of MP3, WMA, ASF, WAV and OGG it also alows one to conect the plarer to a Audio out of thire stareio system and Oerform Realtime MP3 Encodeing of ones LP and tapes as MP3's a process that is not fun on a computer

dude Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: January 30 2004 Location: Australia Status: Offline Points: 1338	Posted: May 31 2004 at 10:10
	yes fitz i have a freind who owns one of these little beuteis and you CAN store thousands of songs on them.His model is about 5 inches long and about 2 inches wide,the sound quality is amazing......i must find out HOW they work stunning stuff!!

Certif1ed Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 08 2004 Location: England Status: Offline Points: 7559	Posted: June 01 2004 at 03:33
	For those with the time and inclination, here are some articles on Tom's about these devices - which I would suggest are essential reading for anyone about to spend $2-500 on a "Walkman" (used generically!) http://www4.tomshardware.com/mobile/20030911/index.html http://www4.tomshardware.com/mobile/20031122/index.html http://www4.tomshardware.com/mobile/20040130/index.html http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20001110/ http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20001004/ And, if you want to know how these things work, try here; http://earthlink.com.com/4520-7964_7-5134106-2.html

Fitzcarraldo Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 30 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1835	Posted: June 01 2004 at 18:18
	Thanks to you all for the comments and URLs - I'll check them out.

DNA1997 Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Newbie Joined: March 08 2004 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 28	Posted: June 10 2004 at 17:05
	Maybe a little late, but I prefer the sound quality, battery life, and general versatility of my MiniDisc player. Not as much storage as an iPod, but a lot more than a regular mp3 player. 260 minutes depending on your recording speed. Light, ultra portable, and indestructible. Oh yeah, you can buy 3 of them for the price of one iPod.

Certif1ed Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 08 2004 Location: England Status: Offline Points: 7559	Posted: June 17 2004 at 11:12
	Yeah - I love my MD as well (only mine's a recorder as well as a player ). If you're considering buying an iPod, however, be careful where you buy it from, as there are iPods and there are iPods... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/17/hmv_ipod/

Fitzcarraldo Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 30 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1835	Posted: June 17 2004 at 11:52
	Yes, I was somewhat surprised to read in that article that the Apple iPod only supports MP3 and AAC formats, but am now confused as the Amazon Web site says that the 40 Gb iPod supports MP3, AAC, WAV, MP3 VBR, Audible, and AIFF formats. Which is correct?!! Anyone with a 40 Gb iPod out there able to enlighten us? The 40 Gb iRiver iHP-140 (mentioned by Dusanyu) apparently supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, ASF and WAV, is about GBP 100 cheaper than the 40 Gb iPod, has a battery that lasts twice as long as the iPod, has a built-in FM tuner, can record MP3 in real-time, and is virtually the same size and weight as the iPod (40 Gb iPod: 104 mm x 61 mm x 18.5 mm, 176 gm; 40 Gb iHP-140: 105 mm x 60 mm x 22 mm, 172 gm). To be fair, the article on the page http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/23/dvd_forum_chooses_ap ple_music/ appears to indicate that AAC is better than WMA 9, MP3 and Sony's ATRAC. Anyway, I'm not going to take the plunge quite yet - I will wait for my birthday as a suitable excuse to buy one, but at present I'm drifting towards the iRiver iHP-140. Thanks also to those of you who have sent me Private Messenger messages about the iPod - please do keep sending me info or posting here as I want to find out as much as possible about the iPod and equivalents before making a final decision, plus find out more about how the things work and how to make best use of them. (And hopefully the information may be of use to others also.) Edited by Fitzcarraldo

mimusica Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Newbie Joined: June 04 2004 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 6	Posted: June 17 2004 at 22:18
	If you are like me, you probably spend thousands of dollars, pounds or euro's on an LP and CD collection. Why would you want to get all your favourite prog bands on a tiny harddrive? from a set of the cheapest possible earphones? I don't get it, maybe I'm oldfashioned. I want to hear those guys (and galls) coming to me from gigantic speakers, with megawatts of power, from great record players or if necessary, high-end CD players. Abacab goes iPod? Count me out!
	Without music, life would be a mistake. Friedrich Nietzsche

Fitzcarraldo Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 30 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1835	Posted: June 18 2004 at 07:12
	mimusica, for one simple reason: I have to travel very frequently and I can't take hundreds of CDs and my HI-FI with me. The idea of being able, wherever I am - be it an airport, in an aeroplane, in a hotel, in an office or dentist's waiting room - to listen to any track from any of my hundreds of CDs (Progressive Rock and otherwise) is, to me, highly desirable. And, as I have now been told by several people, with high encoding rates (which is now practical with 40 Gb and 60 Gb tiny hard drives) the MP3s, WMAs, AACs or whatever sound very good if one is using good quality in-ear earphones and also when pumped through a decent HI-FI. So, although my main reason is 'massive' portability, fast and convenient choice at home (in the lounge by connecting to the HI-FI, or in my study by connecting to my PC's external powered speakers) is also of interest if the sound quality is good. Ideally, as I mentioned in the LP versus CD thread, I would like a fully solid state device - e.g. no rotating (hard) disc - but such things do not yet exist in pocket size to hold hundreds of CDs-worth of music, so I'll have to make do with an iPod, iRiver or whatever with a tiny hard disc. But the possibility of having my entire CD collection, sampled at a sufficiently high rate and quantization to make it difficult to tell the difference from a CD, is attractive to me.

Fitzcarraldo Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 30 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1835	Posted: August 29 2004 at 11:40
	Further to mimusica's previous post back in June and my reply, I've just made an interesting observation (well, listening, actually): Today I happened to listen to an album burned to MP3 at 192 kbps and played through my PC's external amplified speakers (which produce quite reasonable quality sound, I should add). Now, I bought a music CD the other day by a different band and listened to it today, again via my PC's external speaker system. I have to say the sound quality of the MP3s from the first band's album is much better than the sound quality of the audio on the second band's audio CD. What I'm trying to get at is that is seems that, with a well recorded/produced album, MP3s can sound quite good. Or, to put it another way, playing the MP3s made from the first band's album through my HIFI sounds better than playing the second band's audio CD on my HIFI. There appears to be a bigger difference in the recording quality between the two CDs than in the conversion to the 'lossy' MP3 format. Mind you, my ears are not as sensitive as mimusica's: I can't hear distortion on the inner tracks of an LP (see his posting on another thread), so perhaps an audiophile would still not like the sound of the MP3s. But, for me, it was quite an eye-opener.

goose Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: June 20 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 4097	Posted: August 29 2004 at 17:38
	I think .aac is about as close to indistinguishable from CD (with earphones, that is) as you can get in terms of lossy digital formats. I don't know which players offer this apart from iPod, but if there aren't any others it's probably a good idea to wait until someone else is doing it, or in fact if you have 40 GB to play with just using .wav format. Personally I'm sticking to CDs for the time being...

Certif1ed Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 08 2004 Location: England Status: Offline Points: 7559	Posted: August 30 2004 at 17:18
	Much depends on the bitrate - your average 128k mp3 won't fool anyone; it's lossy, and a decent hi-fi will exacerbate the lossiness. 256k or 320k is a different boiling utensil of aquatic life, and CDs tend to vary in quality hugely depending on the mastering; Most early Genesis CDs, for example, pride themselves on being "AAD", meaning that the Analogue source was sent through an Analogue mixer to the Digital CD recorder, but sound muted with a narrow dynamic range. Porcupine Tree, on the other end of the spectrum have a sharp, wide dynamic range across the mix that gives a real "bling" to their music. Those little mp3 players are great for music "on the go" - I'm very tempted to trade my portable MiniDisc recorder in for one

goose Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: June 20 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 4097	Posted: August 31 2004 at 06:11
	yeah but .aac 64kbps is apparently better sounding than .mp3 128kbps, or maybe it was even 192kbps. So it stands to reason that 192kbps .aac is going to be something special

Fitzcarraldo Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 30 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1835	Posted: August 31 2004 at 08:23
	Check out the various URLs on the following forum thread: http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=990&am p;PN=1 where the subject of the different quality of the codecs was discussed. It's interesting listening to clips of the same piece of music encoded by all the different formats, and one can tell the difference in some cases. AAC did figure quite highly, but then so did OGG and WMA. Anyway, the external pages referenced in that thread have some interesting (and detailed) comparisons and things to say. One of the sites even compares different bit rates for the same encoding method if I recall.

Reed Lover Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: July 16 2004 Location: Sao Tome and Pr Status: Offline Points: 5187	Posted: September 03 2004 at 20:18
	I use Mp3 pro on my MP3's ripped with Nero 6. This sounds remarkably good at only 80kbps.I only have a Freecom Beatmaster 128mb portable player but with its Sennheiser Phones it sounds good. When I play the tracks on my PC they sound surprisingly crisp, however I have an Audigy 2 soundcard and decent creative speakers.Surely you dont want perfect HiFI on a portable. The functionality of having so many tracks available on the go is the real seller here.The unlimited rips plug in for the Mp3 pro codec in Nero is widely available on hacker sites.


Certif1ed Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 08 2004 Location: England Status: Offline Points: 7559	Posted: September 04 2004 at 13:22
	I'll second that - MP3 Pro is a superb piece of software - and dirt cheap too! Note that you can also use it to burn and rip CDs - but if you got Nero free with your CD Burner, then there's simply nothing better for burning Thanks for the tip about the CODEC - I wasn't aware of it!