Question about MP3 and iPods

What bitrate are you listening to music at on these friends' iPods?

If it's at 256 AAC or higher, then there should be almost no difference between the sound quality of those and a regular CD, at least that 99.999999 percent of people can hear.

 

I wouldn't get rid of my CD's but having an IPOD is a godsend for me. (I have 3) I also have a all-Naim home rig that I use when I can, but a lot of my listening is done on IPODs due to circumstances.

One big thing..if sound quality is an issue for you you can always put your CD's into your IPOD in lossless and you lose no quality. (It just takes up more space) You don't have to use the MP3 format if you don't want to.

 

Gold, tortillas and wine.

 

................wat?

 

I can't tell the difference between high bitrate MP3s and redbook CD audio but I know people who can detect the difference instantly and with 100% accuracy. The wave patterns are certainly different and within the range of human hearing. People should make their own decisions and listen to what they find pleasant.

 

you have got to be kidding, right?

 

Already debunked. Apple is closed-source, but even Steve Jobs realized that his iPod would have never succeeded if it did not support MP3 playback. Too many Napster kids back then to cater to. And even today, there's the Amazon crowd that they probably want to support.

MP3 is certainly not perfect, but one thing I like about it is that it is a standard that most, if not all, DAP vendors support. You can't say that about any other codec, even AAC.

 

I have an IPod but I use my Sony MP3 player more as I don't like having to go through ITunes to get my music. With other players, the folders full of music I want are just in My Computer on my PC and I drag and drop the whole folder as opposed to doing it a song at a time in ITunes. I, of course, may be missing something — if someone knows how to drop and drag a folder through ITunes, please tell me.

 

Just drag the folder and drop it on to "Music" in the Library section. Just did it a moment ago with a folder. Easy as pie. Or you can do it by going to the File menu and clicking on "Add Folder to Library".

Always amazed at the number of people I see ragging on iTunes. My advice - learn how to use it. Personally, I never have problems with lost files, deleted album artwork, etc. And I'm no shill for Apple.

 

I rag on it because it's still overly complicated. Joel1963's SONY player is like my Cowon - you don't need to use ANY third-party app to get music onto it. Just use whatever file manager that your OS has, nothing more. Now that's easy as pie.

An iPod, on the other hand, is not as easy. You have to have iTunes installed, and if you are an Ubuntu user like myself, a VM running Windows because Apple doesn't consider us important enough to support (in their defense, I can probably understand why - not enough ROI). And, for whatever reason that I have yet to explain, iTunes loves to break up your collection into some weird DB format and rename everything. Drove me nuts and it's why I stopped using it, even when I was a Windows user. I don't want my music player touching my files and directory structure, unless I tell it to. It also touches your tags, even when you explicitly tell it not to - at least this was the case a few years ago when I was using it with an iPod I had at the time.

iTunes is great for the masses, but I personally don't like it. Too much of that Apple "we know what's best for you" coded into it.

 

I switched from 320Kbps MP3 to 200Kbps VBR HE-AAC recently and it sounds more pleasing to my ears, plus I can fit about 40% more stuff on my iPod (5th Gen 60GB Video).

The iPod is a necessary evil. As many have stated, it is really just a tool to use in situations where critical listening is not necessary or possible. I also have my entire library encoded to lossless ALAC so I can stream my entire iTunes library wirelessly via AirTunes.

Apple/iPod/iTunes gets a bad rap for ruining the music industry, but at least they managed to CHANGE the way the music industry works, which is more than you can say for anyone else. The delivery system is different, but the fact remains: there will always be good and bad material, and good and bad mastering. Don't shoot the messenger, I say.

 

Perhaps you don't have music that iTunes can't tell from Shinola. Try that with a Carl Storey, Phuong Thanh or Behnam Manahedji album some time. It should be good for a laugh. iTunes didn't even recognize one of my Flaming Lips albums!

It's not that I expect iTunes to recognize these artists. I just expect a player to play whatever I want it to play without randomly mixing everything up and making it impossible to just play an album.

 

Try running it on a Commodore 64. Apple, why don't you support the number one selling computer of all time?! The iPod will never take off!

 

Buy an external drive for $70; drag the "I Tunes" folder into it, walk away for a few hours. Dead easy.

If your hard drive crashes and someone runs a truck over your eternal drive, you can always use a program like IPodGetter to retrieve the music directly off your pod.

Bottom line, if you have a good digital library, you can feel pretty secure knowing you own at least three copies of it.

 

Ubuntu is bit more current and in use today than the Commodore 64.

 

You conveniently edited my comment, deleting this part -- (in their defense, I can probably understand why - not enough ROI). I guess your sarcastic reply would not have worked as well, if you had left that in.

Yes, they don't support Ubuntu because only about 1% of the population (if that) uses Ubuntu or some other Linux distro. Or Amiga or BeOS or whatever other non-mainstream OS is used by others. But the bottom line is that, if they actually supported drag and drop, they wouldn't have to because it would "just work" as long as the OS could read the iPod filesystem.

 

Holy cow...it was just a joke.

Tough crowd!

 

I don't like it either, but am forced to use it to manage my iPod Classic. Apparently there are Foobar users/iPod owners who are able to bypass iTunes entirely by using the iPod Manager UI component, but I tried it and it was too clunky and non-intuitive for me. I still rip my CDs to FLAC so I can eventually listen to them through Foobar and/or a Squeezebox when I decide to go the music server route but have to convert them to MP3s to put on my iPod. So my process is pretty cumbersome: rip CD to FLAC using dBpoweramp, download album art from Album Art Exchange, add album art to FLAC tags using MP3tag, convert FLAC files to mp3 using dBpoweramp, add mp3s to iTunes (i.e., "Add Folder to Library"), then FINALLY drag the resulting files to my iPod.

In hindsight, I wished I would've gotten a non-Apple portable music player but I bought into the hype. I don't hate my iPod and use it all the time, but it is frustrating as a PC guy that I'm forced to use iTunes to manage its contents effectively.

 

^ When I still used my Nano up to around February of this year, I used Winamp to load music onto it. No problems at all doing that......except for one little issue : Winamp was not able to load a file's album art (though it can do it for my Philips player).

 

If you have a 5.5G Classic or below, you can use Rockbox as an alternative UI, and bypass the Apple UI completely. It supports MSC mode (drag and drop), FLAC and gapless. I used to use it on a 4G and later a 5G, and it fit my needs well. The "bad", if there is one, is that it takes a little work to set up themes and make it shine. And also video playback support on the 5G is medicore. But I personally think it's worth it, if you using it as a music player.

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IpodPort -- the latter "Classic" devices also work, but is listed as unstable and sounds like a bit of a headache to install on those.

I call it as I see it. No worries.

 

That got me curious. We have several computers here at work where iTunes has never been opened. I just checked, and the default is labelled as "iTunes PLUS" 256kps AAC.

 

Thanks - that actually makes sense. Apple would want the default setting to be AAC, although I'm (happily) surprised that it's 256kps as the default.

I have an iTunes setup for my kid's iPods, but I changed it to ALAC a while back.

 

While the iTunes Plus spec of 256kbps AAC offers better resolution than a comparable MP3 file, the Nero HE-AAC encoder does a better job I think (the iTunes Plus AAC encoder is not true VBR, Apple uses their own algorithm). Also, Nero can encode at up to 400kbps while iTunes tops out at 256. I recently did some A-B comparisons with the same FLAC file converted to HE-AAC and iTunes Plus AAC and found the former to be a little more transparent and enjoyable.

 

I have much to learn about all of this new technology. Thanks for all of this info. I still enjoy my vinyl the most. And a good beverage.

I hope more people get into unloading their physical media so I can buy it in the used bins.

So there are lossless ways to preserve the tunes, right? An MP3 is not as good as the original CD from what I gather.