ipod - update, mini review.
Posted by Michael Dale on Sat, 20 Nov 2004 4:58 PMWeee I got an ipod today, day early birthday present. It's a 20gb model. Very funky. I also went shopping, which is very out of character for me ;)
I'm going to play around with the ipod and I'll update my thoughts on it later.
oh. What format do people use with their ipod? AAC, MP3 etc and what bitrate?? tx
added
First impressions of my new ipod.
Well I thought I do a quick run down on my new ipod. It is a 20gb Generation 4 ipod.
When first opening the package I was pretty impressed with the way everything was done. It just had a really nice touch to it. Down to the word “Enjoy” written on the outside of the drivers box. Pretty cool.
Getting the ipod to work in windows was easy. Put the disc in, install and then plug the ipod in. I was asked to restart the computer but I didn’t and haven’t had any problems.
I ipod itself is a slick little device. I love the click wheel. There are four buttons on it and a button in the middle. The wheel itself is a touch pad and it allows you to scroll up and down menus, change volume and a few other things. One thing that I like about it is that it doesn’t feel cheap; it feels very strong (the click wheel and the whole thing).
The software asked me to update the ipods firmware, so I did that. Quick and painless.
The next step was getting music onto this thing. The ipod comes with both a firewire connection and a usb 2 connection. I’ve been using the firewire.
When you start itunes it syncs all your music. I copied about 1.5gb (300 songs) to it and it was done in less than 5 minutes. Nice.
I was hoping that maybe itunes would replace winamp, but this isn’t going to happen. Itunes seems to lack some features and just doesn’t feel as nice as winamp. The program does feel a bit cheap, although not nearly as bad as other things I have used. It works well and looks okay.
The thing that I don’t quite get (and I’m hoping I find this feature), where do I copy my CDs through it? I don’t know if I can! I mean surely you should be able to do this. But I haven’t found a way to do it. Weird indeed. I think I’ll need to stick to winamp 5.
EDIT: Okay then. itunes rips from CD fine just for some reason my main cdrom drive isn't working. No problems through my burner though. Nice, now to get some more music copied!!
The sound quality hasn’t impressed me (some songs are really good, others aren’t) but I think that is more the music format I am using. The ipod supports Apple Lossless Encoder, so I am pretty interested in that. I’ll play around with that later.
EDIT2: Okay I've ripped a few CDs with Apple Lossless Encoder and it is MUCH MUCH better. Very happy. 25mb a song, so it should be ;)
The ipod itself has some cool little features. Like if I unplug the headphones the music pauses. I think that is pretty cool. The click wheel is REALLY nice too.
So far the only downside is that after every 5 or so songs the ipod needs to buffer from the hard drive. So there is a little slow down there. But it is only a small thing.
The headphones are also really comfortable and don’t sound too bad. Cool.
The ipod itself is great; itunes still needs a little work.
Oh the ipod can also be used as a removable hard drive. It just appears as another hard disc in windows. Cool.
So that is about all for now. I love it.
And here are some pictures!
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/apple.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/openbox.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/openbox2.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/ipod.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/ipodback.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/ipodlight.jpg
Photos, photos, photos!!! :P I mean, sure, we've all seen an iPod before, but maybe yours is special? :P Hehehehe. You're slowly becoming a Mac-ite - that's a GOOD thing!
erm... GOOD thing! (stupid BBCode HTML wannabe! :P)
lol bbcode ;) i remember that
AAC whenever possible :)
I'd say half of mine is AAC and the other half is MP3. I'm lazy and haven't yet felt a need to use AAC, but my brother rips using AAC.
You're slowly becoming a Mac-ite
Better than slowly becoming a deadite
... just in case you DON'T know that is an Evil Dead reference.
iTunes rules. You can create "smart playlists" which dynamically change the songs in the playlist, according to the criteria.
And once you get settled in with your iPod, go buy an iTrip:
http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/itrip/
You can have your iPod music come through any radio. Brilliant.
I have that same exact iPod model. (20 GB, generation 4)
Here's a small tip - when you charge the iPod, via the computer (not the wall socket one), don't leave it plugged into the computer overnight (or after you put the computer to sleep). For some reason, if drains the battery.
Before you shut down or sleep the computer, make sure to eject the iPod.
Seems quirky, but it's happened twice to me.
When importing songs from CD's... I've tried so many different settings... but finally (through trial, error, and advice), I settled on the default Music Store setting, which is:
AAC Encoder, High Quality (128 kbps)
Of course, some people claim that 128 kbps is not "archival quality"...:
http://photomatt.net/2004/07/13/itunes-idea/#comment-5709
But... it is not worth the extra storage, to make your imported songs a higher quality, such as 160, 192, etc. It MAY SOUND slightly better - but not enough to warrant the extra disk space.
With iPod's, it's all about quantity, not quality.
And even so, the AAC encoder is great quality. It's better than MP3.
SO, that's what I do. Thought I'd share.
I noticed that you can jack up the bit rate on iTunes way up to 320kbps, with custom settings of course. Minus the extra [high] disk space, would you say there would be at all a noticeable difference between something ripped at 192kbps to something ripped at 320kbps?
I will admit I tried it out (without any knowledge of what I was doing) for a while back but apart from the large size, I didn't notice any difference in the sound quality.
MP4 =p.