only here wrote:

slowriot wrote:my sister had one of those early models that had the battery issues and she never registered or filled out the warranty or anything, and now she's left with a totally useless non-functional ipod.

same thing happened to me. this was the 40gb ipod that was on the market for about 2 months. the machine died after about 15 months. i registered for the class action lawsuit. i'm still waiting on my $50.
in the meantime, i stopped collecting mp3s altogether and got a new computer.

Same thing happened to me. After about yeah, 15 months I was left with a $200 paperweight. I called apple and explained my story and how I thought I had a lemon of a product and all they did was send my a coupon towards the purchase of a new pod. I think 60 bucks off a purchase of 200 dollars or more. The coupon expires in Decemeber, so maybe with some Christmas money I'll get a new one. I'm still not sure though.

In the meantime I found a Walkman at a yard sale for $1. It was pretty much brand new. So now, if I have a free afternoon or some time to kill, I'll put a weeks or so worth of music I want to listen to on cassette.

Pure L wrote:Since this question isn't worth starting a new thread for, I figure now is a good time to ask it:

What's the difference between lossless and wav/aiff?

Aren't wavs and/or aiffs the raw audio data?

This is my query as well. 'Lossless'? Are they genuinely so? Could someone like myself who can't stand MP3's notice a difference, you think?

it means you don't lose any of the quality when compressing it back to wave (read: burn a cd). an cd audio burned out of mp3 will sound drastically worse than the mp3's which were used in burning it, you will loose even more quality by converting this audio cd back to mp's. with flac you can do this as many times you won't and things will sound the same.

edit: as for sound quality, there is no difference between wave and flac.

eephour wrote:

only here wrote:

slowriot wrote:my sister had one of those early models that had the battery issues and she never registered or filled out the warranty or anything, and now she's left with a totally useless non-functional ipod.

same thing happened to me. this was the 40gb ipod that was on the market for about 2 months. the machine died after about 15 months. i registered for the class action lawsuit. i'm still waiting on my $50.
in the meantime, i stopped collecting mp3s altogether and got a new computer.

Same thing happened to me. After about yeah, 15 months I was left with a $200 paperweight. I called apple and explained my story and how I thought I had a lemon of a product and all they did was send my a coupon towards the purchase of a new pod. I think 60 bucks off a purchase of 200 dollars or more. The coupon expires in Decemeber, so maybe with some Christmas money I'll get a new one. I'm still not sure though.

My first ipod recently broke (unresponsive/sad face icon) conveniently right after the service plan expired. Just got a second one as a gift a week ago and today it fell about two feet and apparently broke inside (unresponsive/sad face icon, yup!). These things are complete disasters.

Maurice wrote:Apple lossless is about half the size of the uncompressed .aiff, and--hey--lossless. See how that works for you.

You might want to look at real headphones instead of the earbuds, but that's an individual choice. I'm fond of the Sennheiser PX 200's for portability, and they have pretty good isolation for a small headphone. Mainly I got them for the better frequency curve compared to most cheap headphones, but again that's an individual thing depending on the nature of your ear canal.

I really dig the lossless compression. It does sound as good as a CD (OK, so a CD isn't the best sounding thing in the world, but a 256kbps mp3 sounds worse, depending on how much program compression the music you like involves -- if you listen to pop music with a lot of program compression, it will sound OK. If you listen to music with dynamics, the mp3's or whatever lossy data compression is used will sound awful. This and a generation of kids with tin ears and no music education are why so many encode their music in 128kbps mp3s)

This was the only reason I bought the iPod. I searched for some other player that had lossless compression and a high capacity... None exist. Cowon is about as close as it gets, but only a 30Gb capacity.

I think the iPod UI is highly overrated (as with all Apple stuff -- it's just not that good at all). iTunes is buggy and not designed that well either. The DRM stuff is maddening at times...

What is with the Gorrilaz? Why are they so prominent in iPod marketing? I just don't get this at all.

rayj wrote:

Pure L wrote:Since this question isn't worth starting a new thread for, I figure now is a good time to ask it:

What's the difference between lossless and wav/aiff?

Aren't wavs and/or aiffs the raw audio data?

This is my query as well. 'Lossless'? Are they genuinely so? Could someone like myself who can't stand MP3's notice a difference, you think?

Yes... Lossless means what it means. The 16 bit/44khz data is not lost during compression. This is like WinZip. If you Zip up a data file or application, when you unzip it, you get the same exact data. Nothing is lost. It basically codes redundant data as symbols that get re-introduced when the codec plays the music back. There's more to it than that, but that's the best I can explain it, as I am not an expert on data compression. The main thing is that none of the sound is lost, and it is identical to a 16bit/44khz WAV file, only with a smaller size on disk.

The lossy compression is more like when you covert a high resolution photo to .gif file. It doesn't look the same, but it is much smaller. MP3's or AAC or whatever are all lossy, so you will hear artifacts and there are lots of psychoacoustic tricks to make is sound OK. I can tell the difference. The high end is totally wrong. It sounds swirly. The whole sound is thin and has no meat. You can especially hear it on things like reverb and delays. Also, if the music you like has dynamics (classical, jazz, progressive rock) then you will really notice it on quieter passages.

On an 80GB iPod, you'll get about 250 CD's worth of music if you use lossless. That's nothing to sneeze at, because they sound exactly like CD's...

Now the iPod itself, is a different story. It has it's own preamp, which may or may not be the best. They do not release specs on the sound quality of the iPod. There have been some independent tests, which place it below the sound quality of Creative Labs, Cowon, and Dell mp3 players. I personally don't think this difference is as much as lossy vs. lossless compression. I think my iPod with lossless music sounds better than my Creative Labs Nomad with 256kbps mp3 files...

You guys will have to excuse me here...I'm about to do what I always do, and take a tangential focus on the topic at hand. I have put some thought into this, though...

I don't have an Ipod, or the like, because I'm kinda against them. This is weird and uptight, but I try to listen to music in the format that music was originally recorded for. For the most part (not always), this means LP's. Some electronic and 'experimental' stuff, for CD, sure. However, for rock...

I will audition stuff online, with MP3's and whatnot. If I like it, at that point I order it on the targeted format of its release (for most of the 'cool guys', this means vinyl). Not always...for instance, I have Deerhoof's 'Milk Man' on CD, and intentionally so. The LP works for me and my stereo, in the majority of cases, and I like it that way. I cannot always get the releases I want in the format I want, so at that point I will compromise. Not ideal, to my way of thinking, though. I DO have lots of CD-R's, but I see that as falling under the compromise/get it when you can category...

I also tend not to listen to music 'out and about'. This is tantamount to the prevailing cell phone thing up here in Seattle, where both crazy homeless types and businessman types all walk around shouting into the air. I understand the convenience, but it drives me crazy. I feel obligated to pay attention to my surroundings...often they make me want to strap a cannister of ball bearings around my head and pound it against the wall, but I still need to know what is going on. As an avid consumer of public transportation, this is mostly practical and necessary.

The only way I would get an Ipod/etc. is if I need it to load tons of music my clients in A/V work want to (not) hear, so I don't have to waste my efforts dragging around CD's I don't like.

So here I stand...no cell phone, no Ipod. This makes me cooler than you all, right? OK, maybe not...

You can't beat LPs. They sound better than CDs and digital audio any day.

For me, the iPod is just convenient. Having the equivalent of 250 CDs at the same quality in something the size of a pack of cards is impressive.

This is one alarming trend, however. As technology advances, there is often little attention to audio quality, and more attention to jamming 20,000 songs on something the size of a sugar cube.

Finding a portable audio device that can play something at CD quality is not easy, and the fact is, most consumers can't tell the difference.

I suspect few people actually use the lossless compression, because out of the box iTunes is set to convert to AAC files, which is lossy.

In fact, I wish you could get albums on 2 track reel-to-reel. Whatever happened to that? They used to put albums on the format in the 60s or 70s, and again... It fell to the wayside as the consumer friendly (but crappy sounding) cassette came in favor.

Fuck iPods
virtual this, virtual that......