iPOD HELP!!!!!!!!!!!

MACacd

I am constantly baffled why people persist in buying apple Ipods. The only thing good about the whole iPod circus is that apple know how to advertise a product.

To me the iPod has no redeeming features, it has a poor batter, overly rigid file recognition issues, they look tacky, have poor build quality and cost far to much for what they can do.

I just wish people would put some effort into researching the product before spending the best part of £200 on a substandard lump of plastic.

Mr_Skint_2

MACacd wrote:

I am constantly baffled why people persist in buying apple Ipods. The only thing good about the whole iPod circus is that apple know how to advertise a product.

To me the iPod has no redeeming features, it has a poor batter, overly rigid file recognition issues, they look tacky, have poor build quality and cost far to much for what they can do.

I just wish people would put some effort into researching the product before spending the best part of £200 on a substandard lump of plastic.

I will say on a personal note I think that the ipod sucks
this is my own opinion........... :beer:

wolfman

alexjohnson wrote:

I don't have a Linn stereo (or whatever) and on my Sony 5.1 and using in-ear earphones on my iPod I certainly don't feel that I can detect anything, but it may depend on what kind of music you like. On the net you can find people who have done blind tests where they can't tell the difference. You can find other people (a minority, I think it's fair to say) who say they can. I suspect a minority of people have excellent ears (like the people who blend wine and whisky or the people who make perfume, by analogy) and in this context that's kind of unfortunate for them! I'm not deaf, I am detail-oriented, but I certainly can't make out any difference.

It's not so much about your ears, but what you're playing the music through. Unless you're using a pair of Shure in-ears (or similar quality) I doubt you would notice the difference via in-ear headphones. Basically a reasonable hifi (setup properly) will show the difference.

I can play my music on a £500 stereo and quite easily tell the difference. You'll find the bass is quite nasty and undefined at such a low quality. Just try playing Influenced by the Chemical Brothers and you'll see what I mean. The more you compress music, the more of it you lose. To compress a cd track to nearly 4x times less than its original data rate is going to require it to be cut down. You'll suffer mostly with bassy tracks and classical music.

I know some people will just want to listen to their music via mp3 player/iPod, but with technolgy moving forward like it is you're mostly likely at some point to use it on a non-portable device. You can hook computer's up to tv's and stereo's and send stuff wirelessy and put it on your phone. And storage is dirt cheap, you can get a 200gb hard drive for under £80 these days.

The point is technology is moving forward, getting cheaper, better sounding. Music however is still on cd and is unlikely to change anytime soon. You may as well get a decent copy of the music now, and a portable one at that, hence recommending mp3 instead of aac.

128kbps is nearer radio quality than cd quality. You should at least use 192kbps (mp3 or aac), but for a true, almost exact copy of your cd 320kbps is best.

Ok, so you would fit less on your Nano, but do you really need xxx hundreds of songs on there? 5 years back people were happy with 60 songs on their mini-disc. I personally use my Shuffle most and just rotate what I want to listen to. I keep my music collection centralised on my computer at home, rather than restricting it to a portable device.

wolfman

alexjohnson wrote:

I don't doubt that equipment makes a difference, but isn't that mostly about amplification and speaker quality?

Mixture generally. Equipment in terms of amplification and speakers of course, but also setup. Headphones aren't the best of things for defining the difference as there range is much more limited. Having said that, nor is a hifi setup in the corner of a room. Not everyone has a perfect setup though, but even though mine isn't at the moment, I like to have a higher quality rip for when I do get it setup properly.

alexjohnson wrote:

I guess I am less convinced that there is a huge difference in the sound quality of the source material, and since you mention MD, I remember when that came out that experts pooh-poohed the ATRAC compression, yet couldn't tell the difference in blind tests.

The Atrac format isn't great, especially when compared to mp3 or aac. In my opinion it's more suited to portable devices than anything else. If listening to music through headphones or quietly on an average hifi you probably won't notice too much difference depending upon the music. I personally like to crank it up every so often, and listening from the Prodigy to Beethoven can quite clearly notice a lose quality, or definition, mostly in the higher frequencies, or bass which becomes muffled. It's all subjective, although you can see from listening graphs the frequencies that are cut off when encoding at lower qualities.

alexjohnson wrote:

As to storage you're right of course but for me life is too short - I don't need back ups of back ups of back ups.

I didn't mean in terms of backups. I just keep all of my collection centralised. Being on my computer it can be accessed by other devices and people in my house. If it were all on my iPod I'd be a lot more restricted.

alexjohnson wrote:

I would note though from the original post - it must have taken you ages to rip your collection if you are using LAME as you can't do that in iTunes, can you?

Nope, I don't use iTunes. Originally did, but I don't like it. Especially at work I've usually got Photoshop, Visual Studio, Sql Server etc... eating up my resources so need something light (ie Winamp) otherwise my machine starts to die (upgrade me work!). I just find iTunes doesn't do anything that wasn't already available. To me it's like Internet Explorer and Winamp is the modular Firefox, bit of an unrealistic comparison but you should get the jist of where I'm coming from.

alexjohnson wrote:

I took a look at the EphPod site too. Gets good chat I grant you but the front page talks out about DLLs. The FAQ on iLounge talks about deleting files on the iPod, which, by the way, will delete all your music.

Yeah, EphPod isn't without its bugs. I never actually had a problem, apart from with iTunes. iTunes thought the iPod had been corrupted so formatted my iPod without asking me. That was the day I fully switched across

alexjohnson wrote:

I don't work in IT and therefore I don't now a single person who uses Ogg Vorbis.

To be honest I don't know anyone that uses it either, but I've encoded with it and the results are good. The thing I like about it, is that it's open source and always under development.

alexjohnson wrote:

For me, my black 4GB nano is quite literally the most pleasing electronics gadget I have ever bought.

Stop tempting me!

alexjohnson wrote:

Would I like to store 60GB? Of course, but I value it being small and light more highly.

I'm the same. I prefer small and light. In fact I went through the whole "less choice is more" thing with my Shuffle. I've got about 1,000 albums now yet I struggle to pick a track purely because my brain is overwhelmed by the choice. Whatever I pick, there'll always be something better. Hence the Shuffle, I put what I want to listen to on, and just listen through it. Not to everyone's taste but it works for me.