The new iPod shuffle and nano - Holy **** (1 Viewer)

[Paul McElligott]

Nope.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

My olde blacke iRiver still has specs that beat most things out there, including the Zen. Not changing from that until it dies on me (heaven forfend.) I'd like one of the new shuffles though, simply for the incredible wearability of it. You can haul that around without even thinking about it until you need some tunes (like in the server room today; the noise of a thousand fans (or something like that... ) gets to you fast - but with some nice Shure earplug style phones and a Shuffle it would be a fair bit less stressful.)

 

[MikeH]

Just remember for all of those looking to upgrade to donate to the "Mike wants an ipod for dirt cheap charity". You can either contact directly or use the Hardware for Sale/Trade section.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

i'll be damned if i've ever heard better sound than the original ipod shuffle, for an mp3 player. you'd never think so, but that thing sounded great. there are some very favorable reviews out there.

i'm thinking of selling my non-audio playing 1 GB shuffle on ebay (for whatever i could get for it) and buying the new shuffle. running with my 60GB ipod isnt really great, and certainly isnt what i bought it for. the new shuffle looks great.

CJ

 

[RichP]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1777890,00.asp

 

[Jason Kirkpatri]

^ thanks for the link! Looks like I'll be springing for a new shuffle.

Edit: didn't see the date. Doesn't address the new shuffles. Doesn't matter, though, I'll probably still opt for the new shuffle.

 

[Ray Chuang]

I have to disagree on that! Now that I have my new blue-metal case 4 GB iPod Nano, I compared the sound quality of the new Nano versus my old Creative Zen Nano Plus 512 MB playing back Tangerine Dream's Dream Mixes 1 (a CD with very wide dynamic range). I found the AAC 128 kbps "rip" to be clearer than the 128 kbps "rip" done in Windows Media Audio.

 

[ThomasC]

Man, the iPod has come a long way. $499 for a 10GB iPod 4 and 1/2 years ago, and now $349 for a 80GB iPod.

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-865236.html

 

[Rob Gardiner]

What formats do the new Ipods support? Is FLAC among them?

 

[ThomasC]

It doesn't look like any new formats are supported. This is the list: AAC, MP3, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF and WAV.

 

[Rob Gardiner]

Thomas,

Thanks for the info.

I did a little research on my own. Although the Ipod has no native support for the FLAC format, it does support FLAC when used with the third-party firmware known as Rockbox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox

http://www.rockbox.org

However, I don't know what disadvantages, if any, come with using Rockbox on an Ipod.

 

[Ted Todorov]

Are there any non-ideological advantages to FLAC over Apple Lossless?

 

[Brian Perry]

Speaking of FLAC, I currently have my entire 1,000+ CD collection backed up on a 500GB hard drive using FLAC, primarily becasue I wanted to have a lossless backup that would fit on one hard drive. Size-wise, I think my entire library would fit onto the new 80GB ipod (if compressed). What would be the easiest way to import the whole thing to the ipod? It would be great if I didn't have to convert folder by folder or album by album. (Or song by song...I have separate folders for each artist.)

 

[Christ Reynolds]

battery life.

CJ

 

[Rob Gardiner]

Ted,

The big practical advantage is that I just got done converting my entire CD collection to FLAC. It would be a shame if I had to convert it again.

The "F" in FLAC stands for "free", which means that no permission need be obtained, and no royalties need be paid, in order to include FLAC support in any product. All that is required is the will to do so.

What upsets me is that the Ipod supports Apple's own proprietary "Apple Lossless" format, but not FLAC. That is the kind of tactic I expect from Microsoft!

In any case, I am pleased that the new Ipods support gapless playback. One of the Ipod's two (in my opinion, fatal) flaws has finally been remedied!

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Picked up my new Nano yesterday and my live recordings are so much more enjoyable to listen to now with the gapless playback. The screen is definitely brighter (maybe because it isn't scratched) and I'll wait to see what the battery life is like, but for now the gapless playback was worth the upgrade cost for me.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Well, you're comparing apples and oranges. Or AAC's and WMA's, to be specific. AAC is the better format. Then there's always the whole issue of what headphones you use (if they are bad enough to make the comparison moot in and of themselves, etc.)

S/N ratio etc other specs for the Apple products have historically been pretty iffy, but I haven't seen/researched how the new crop stacks up in that department, so take that as a huge disclaimer, there.

My iRiver with the Rockbox firmware wipes the floor with the early Apple stuff at least, soundquality-wise. It isn't nearly as pretty, or small, however which is why I'm now probably adding the new Shuffle to complement it.

 

[DaveF]

Can you provide a reference for that? I looked into compression methods a bit last year and found it generally concluded that AAC and WMA were superior to MP3. But I couldn't find good conclusions on AAC vs WMA.

 

[Ted Todorov]

Indeed, I'm in the process of converting my entire collection to Apple Lossless so I know how much hard work is involved... I wonder if there is software that will transcode files between FLAC & Apple Lossless in either direction -- one should be able to do it with no loss in quality.

Don't get me wrong, I am all in favor of Free formats. But there is a simple, non-sinester explanation with Apple going for AAC & Apple Lossless vs. Ogg Vorbis & FLAC -- the record companies, and Hollywood.

I'll bet that Apple would have been overjoyed to sell DRM free music from the iTunes Store -- indeed they fought a pitched battle with the RIAA which wanted far more restrictive DRM (as all the other (failed) stores before iTunes had) and is now fighting the same battle with the movie studios (Amazon has more restrictive DRM than iTunes).

So what does this have to do with formats? Apple can add a DRM layer to AAC & Apple Lossless for music it sells -- it can't do it with the Free formats. I bet that in the future when bandwith becomes cheaper they would start offering Apple Lossless versions of music from their store. The RIAA would never permit them to sell stuff in DRM free FLAC.

Ted

 

[Ray Chuang]

I recently bought this headphone for my portable music players:



The Sony MDR-EX71SL/WK is one of the best low-cost in-ear headphones out there with excellent sound quality. (Yes, the Shure in-ear headphones are better but they're also much more expensive, too). Using this headphone, I can tell the AAC playback on the iPod Nano has better overall sound than the WMA playback on the Zen Nano Plus.