Best Portable Music Device (i-pod, i-river, creative, etc). (1 Viewer)

[Tim Markley]

The Rio Karma comes with a docking station which has audio out that allows you to connect it to your home stereo. No need to buy anything else. Most car audio interfaces are simply Aux In that will work with any MP3 player, portable DVD player, etc.

 

[Ted Lee]

exactly...and that's the problem!

the alpine interface does more then just aux in. it shows info from the ipod, it can control the playlists, etc. it's a fully integrated system allowing you to use the power of the ipod...the same goes for the whole house adaptor.

all i'm saying is these are the kinds of "extra" features you can't get with other players.

 

[Ted Lee]

well...i can't really comment about this...

 

[Michael St. Clair]

When I bought my Karma, I felt it was superior in virtually every way to the iPod (price, lossless FLAC playback, parametric equalizer, battery life, gapless playback). I'd hate to go with the inferior iPod just because it has a lot of accessories.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Ummm... I said "non-user-replaceable", and already followed that point w/ mention of the exact $100 Apple service you linked to, which is pretty ridiculous if you ask me. A little too quick to defend the iPod there, no?

RE: the add-on stuff, well, given the prices they charge, at least some of those add-on items should've been included w/ the deal, instead of requiring more expensive purchases to get, IMHO. For instance, the iPod Photo's photo feature was a joke when they were charging such a high premium until the recent price drop. And still, it requires a $30 add-on (that's just coming out these next couple weeks) to do direct transfer from camera to iPod. Makes no sense that the iPod Photo should require an add-on for this. And even w/ the add-on, you still won't be able to fully utilize the photo features, eg. slideshow on TV output, and there still won't be any kind of RAW format support for photos either.

Yes, I'm still considering the 60GB iPod Photo because it sounds like it does barely enough for my photographic needs (w/ the $30 add-on), but it's only barely though -- will still have to see how slow and battery draining photo transfers will be (and I'm not holding my breath on that one).

If the Epson P2000 supported a lossless audio format like FLAC, I probably would buy that instead for a similar overall price although I'd miss the extra 20GB storage. If only...

_Man_

 

[Ted Lee]

bah, technically you could replace it yourself as well.

http://www.ipodbattery.com/slimipodinstall.htm

but it's not for the faint of heart ... and i certainly wouldn't do it myself. not really...i could care less if someone goes for an ipod or not. different strokes for different folks -- and all that....

 

[David Coleman]

I'm curious?? Is there a device that will play protected .AAC and protected .WMA along with MP3?

 

[Chris-V]

I don't believe so.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

so if i tried something else before buying my ipod, i wouldnt like it as much? i like the iriver and a couple other players too, but i like my ipod the best. since it is so popular, i must like it because i want to fit in, right? :rolleyes

CJ

 

[John Alvarez]

My wife got me a memorex for christmas.It holds 256m internal and takes S.D. flash too so I can get a ton of music on it. It also has a F.M. tuner. I only use it for working out so it works great for me. I hated the ear buds and got a pair of behind the neck Nike headphones.It's easy to use and it's all drag and drop for files. It has shuffle modes etc....The unit was about 150 bucks and I get the flash for about 30 bucks.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Just came across this site when doing a little digging on iPodLounge.com:

http://www.bestmp3guide.com/

People on iPodLounge (and apparently some audiophile(?) site called hydrogenaudio.org) are claiming that the MP3's created using the techniques and software mentioned are virtually indistinguishable from the original CDs, especially considering the inexpensive portable playback "system" involved.

Anyone know more details on this? Do you find this to be true, particularly for classical music?

_Man_

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I've been using the software (EAC with LAME encoder) mentioned in that link to rip my CD's recently. It does a fine job at the settings I've been using -- alt-preset standard 192K VBR MP3. Since I am only listening via the iPod, though, I cannot comment on it being indistinguishable from the CD, but it provides CD-like quality for my portable.

Apple's AAC at the same 192K bitrate sounds identical to the EAC rips, IMO. The advantages to EAC/LAME, though, are (1) better error correction in reading certain CD's, and (2) a more compatible format (AAC is pretty much restricted to iPods and iTunes right now, though that is changing).

I had a few CD's that iTunes could not rip without creating some horrible, unlistenable errors -- major dropouts and skipping. The discs looked fine physically -- no marks or scratches, and they played fine in all my CD players. iTunes, though, could not rip them to AAC or MP3 without these errors, even with its error correction turned on. EAC w/ LAME ripped them with no errors. I also had difficulty with a few CD's with CD-ROM content in iTunes that EAC handled with no problems. I've been using the program ever since. My 30GB of iPod music is probably still 90% AAC and 10% MP3 via EAC/LAME, but I've been slowly re-ripping over time.

 

[Scott Lawrence]

The problem isn't the players, it's the MP3 format. It's a frame based format, with a fixed-size frame (I forget the exact size but I think it's around 1 second?).

Let's say you encode a track that 30.5 seconds long, and let's assume the frame size of MP3 format really is 1 second. So, to encode this track you need 31 frames. The first 30 contain the first 30 seconds of the song, and the 31st frame contains the last 0.5 seconds. However, you have to have a whole frame in the result, you can't have partial frames. So the 31st frame is padded with 0.5 seconds of silence at the end, hence the audible gap.

It's true that some players introduce an *additional* gap by not having the beginning of the next track buffered and ready to go, but even assuming the player does that correctly (which I believe most do now), there's still the issue of the silent portion of a frame in the mp3 file itself.

This is impossible to get rid of other than, as others have suggested, you encode the CD as one big track. OR, with some players, like I believe the Karma, if you use their proprietary software to encode and track and load it on the player, the software stores additional meta data with the track to indicate to ignore the last half-frame (or whatever) during playback, even though it still exists in the file. But this solution has it's drawbacks such as storage of the extra metadata, and being tied to the manufacturer's software for everything.

I believe WMA is stream-based rather than frame-based and so does not suffer from the gap (again, assuming the playback device properly buffers the start of the next track while the previous one is finishing). I'm not sure about AAC, whether it's stream- or frame-based.

Cheers,
Scott.