Okay, I don't like listening to compressed music when it comes to live shows. I was wondering , if I got an iPod and wanted it strictly for downloaded live sets, and I compressed the wavs to acc, or whatever itunes offers in terms of compression, with the ipod headphones, does it make much of a difference. I can tell the difference on a stereo. But is it that noticible with those bud headphones. An answer to this question, could mean the difference bettwen me getting a 20gig or a 4gig mini. thanks
ps. should I hold out untill next fall or get one for the summer? Will there be any new innovations in the comming months?
I personally don't notice a difference between Apple's AAC format at 128 kbps, wav/aiff, and Apple's lossless codec. I've tried listening with the earbuds and hooked up to my car stereo and can't tell the difference between the formats.
As far as new iPods, there are and always have been rumors of video iPods. These rumors are gaining credibility since the release of iTunes 4.8, which can now manage and play videos the same way it does music. I forsee a trickle down of the color screens into lower iPod models and a video iPod for the high end model. As far as when this is gonna happen, I have no idea. You can check out the history of previous iPod releases here and take a guess as to when new models are coming out:
Price drops are always hard to predict. If all you want is a 20GB and you're not worreid about having the latest and greatest, wait until Apple announces the upgrades to the product line (video, color, or whatever). You'll be able to find good deals on the remaining stock of the current models from places like Amazon.
Don't forget, students are eligible for an edu discount, which I think amounts to $30 off.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 3:19 pm Posts: 1294 Location: Oakville, Ontario Gender: Male
Knight Rider wrote:
Price drops are always hard to predict. If all you want is a 20GB and you're not worreid about having the latest and greatest, wait until Apple announces the upgrades to the product line (video, color, or whatever). You'll be able to find good deals on the remaining stock of the current models from places like Amazon. Don't forget, students are eligible for an edu discount, which I think amounts to $30 off.
the student discount is 10% of the selling price...
i just bought a 30gig photo and ended up saving around $50
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 4:53 am Posts: 4470 Location: Knoxville, TN Gender: Male
chino wrote:
Knight Rider wrote:
Price drops are always hard to predict. If all you want is a 20GB and you're not worreid about having the latest and greatest, wait until Apple announces the upgrades to the product line (video, color, or whatever). You'll be able to find good deals on the remaining stock of the current models from places like Amazon. Don't forget, students are eligible for an edu discount, which I think amounts to $30 off.
the student discount is 10% of the selling price... i just bought a 30gig photo and ended up saving around $50
And find your school listed. I used this to get the discount on my ipod and mac mini and saved some money. There's quite a few schools listed and you can even use this over the phone--just tell the Apple rep you go to "insert school here" and it's done.
Joined: Wed Oct 20, 2004 2:12 am Posts: 1006 Location: my desk in fort worth
SuperNintendoChalmers wrote:
What about the sound quality on em, between acc 192 and wavs, in terms of live shows?
I'm not sure how much an audiophile you are, but I had shows on my iPod in wave, apple lossless and 192 vbr mp3 and honestly, the difference between the the lossless vs the vbr mp3 was minimal to no difference in perceived sound quality. The headphones that come with the iPod are better than most, but if you're serious about your tunes, you can always drop more money on headphones.
What about the sound quality on em, between acc 192 and wavs, in terms of live shows?
Like I said previously, I can't tell the difference between anything ripped at 128 or higher. I'd recommend downloading iTunes and ripping some of your music at various bitrates to see if you can tell the difference. You'd probably want to hook your computer up to your home stereo or listen through headphones as opposed to your computer speakers. Ideally you'd want to perform a blind test, in which you don't know the bitrate of the song your listening to until afterwards.
Ripping at the lowest bitrate you can stand will not only allow you get the most music on your iPod but also will maximize your battery life, as the hard drive won't have to spin up as often.
The only thing that can be annoying is that the iPod currently doesn't have gapless playback. So live shows will have a small (<1 sec) gap between songs. You can avoid this by joining the tracks in iTunes before ripping them, but then you sacrifice some ability to jump to a specific song easily. I personally don't mind a gap between most songs because its usually just an interruption of crowd noise. On songs that do lead into each other, I will usually rip them as joined tracks.
Joined: Wed Oct 20, 2004 2:12 am Posts: 1006 Location: my desk in fort worth
SuperNintendoChalmers wrote:
Can I still get a 30 gig? The only one I see is the photo one, I thought they made a 30 without the silly picture option.
I know they've got a 30gig version of the 3g, but I think in the 4g line only the iPod photo is 30gigs, going up to 60 gigs. Rumor has it Apple is pushing the iPod Photos over the general iPod, and a new product announcement might be on the way in June.
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 11:45 pm Posts: 1698 Location: Morrisville, NC Gender: Male
chino wrote:
RoyaleWithCheese wrote:
so how do other brands of ipod style devices compare? like dell, etc.
from what i hear, it's all about the ipod..
there are entire websites/forums that answer that question.
my take -- ipods are simple. they play music and they sound pretty good. battery life is adequate but they're overpriced (if you pay full price). thanks to freeipods.com, i didn't...
but i saw this link today and it might be worth looking into:
its a refurbished 40gig ipod (non photo) for $299 (or less)
the 20gig ipod has been anchored at $299 for some time now, so that's a good deal. I have the 40 myself, and while it's a little thicker than the 20, I would have outgrown the 20 real quick.
Apple refreshes the model line once or twice a year. Currently it seems like they're migrating towards the ipod photo, with the color screen.
They have a 30g ipod photo for 349 msrp and a 60 gig ipod photo for 449.
I don't know if YOU will be able to tell teh difference, so I suggest you download iTunes. Convert some live tracks to 128kbit AAC and also to apple lossless. Then listen to those side-by-side and see if you can tell the difference. Better yet, burn them to a CD after converting, and listen on a portable cd player. then see if you can tell. If you're concerned about the quality enough to use lossless compression, you'll want to get better headphones than the included earbuds anyways.
one more thing about live shows. If you encode each track individually, you'll always hear slight pauses between them. The only way to get seamless playback on the ipod is to put all the songs together and encode that as one long file.
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 3:35 pm Posts: 201 Location: da olde europe
check out the rio karma (20gig). i may look a bit clumsy compared to the iPod, but has some great features:
audio-format variety: it will play not only mp3 and wma, but also ogg and flac!
afaik, it's the only hard-drive-mp3-player that is capaple of gapless output, so you wont have silence-blocks between live-tracks (link).
another nice feature is that if you put the rio karma onto the docking-station while playing, playback is instantly switched to the output of the docking-station, so that you can enjoy seamless playback when returning home ... (that is if the docking station is connected to your home stereo)
Joined: Sun Nov 21, 2004 8:25 pm Posts: 295 Location: Texas Our Texas
Leehro wrote:
chino wrote:
RoyaleWithCheese wrote:
so how do other brands of ipod style devices compare? like dell, etc.
from what i hear, it's all about the ipod..
there are entire websites/forums that answer that question.
my take -- ipods are simple. they play music and they sound pretty good. battery life is adequate but they're overpriced (if you pay full price). thanks to freeipods.com, i didn't...
but i saw this link today and it might be worth looking into:
its a refurbished 40gig ipod (non photo) for $299 (or less)
the 20gig ipod has been anchored at $299 for some time now, so that's a good deal. I have the 40 myself, and while it's a little thicker than the 20, I would have outgrown the 20 real quick.
Apple refreshes the model line once or twice a year. Currently it seems like they're migrating towards the ipod photo, with the color screen.
They have a 30g ipod photo for 349 msrp and a 60 gig ipod photo for 449.
I don't know if YOU will be able to tell teh difference, so I suggest you download iTunes. Convert some live tracks to 128kbit AAC and also to apple lossless. Then listen to those side-by-side and see if you can tell the difference. Better yet, burn them to a CD after converting, and listen on a portable cd player. then see if you can tell. If you're concerned about the quality enough to use lossless compression, you'll want to get better headphones than the included earbuds anyways.
one more thing about live shows. If you encode each track individually, you'll always hear slight pauses between them. The only way to get seamless playback on the ipod is to put all the songs together and encode that as one long file.
is the free ipod.com thing bullshit or what? what's the catch?
_________________ I am smellin' like the rose that somebody gave me on my birthday deathbed.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot post attachments in this forum
