iPod nation

[miss buenos aires]

I just got my first iPod. I'm a little embarrassed by it, but I just joined a gym and the exercise bike is unbearably boring without music. I think I got more iPod than I can handle, really, but I couldn't justify buying an 8Gb Nano when I could have 80 for $50 more, you know?

My computer, by the way, holds 30Gb. I find this vaguely ridiculous.

Here is my question. Having an iPod lends a new sense of urgency to loading all my new CDs onto my computer, but I ran out of space a while back. Is there any way for me to shrink my sound files any more? THey are already at 128 kb/s.

Another question: you know how if you burn a data CD instead of a music CD, you can fit 10 or more albums on it? Does that mean that the files are actually smaller? Like, if I imported a CD with 10 albums on it, would it take up one CD's worth of space, or 10?

Thanks, kids...

[Mike Boom]

My advice is to buy a new extra hard disc - get an external hard drive that you can just plug into your USB connection on your PC or Mac (use firewire if youve got a Mac) then you have plenty of room for all your music.

Im not sure what you mean about the 10 albums on one CD thing - but I guess your meaning burning MP3's to disk in which case they will take up as much room as they do on the CD. Unless they are zipped up or something.

[miss buenos aires]

I have an external hard drive that everything is backed up on, but the songs I have on it (that I don't have in my computer) don't automatically show up in iTunes, and I don't want to keep it plugged in all the time.

[bambooneedle]

Another question: you know how if you burn a data CD instead of a music CD, you can fit 10 or more albums on it? Does that mean that the files are actually smaller? Like, if I imported a CD with 10 albums on it, would it take up one CD's worth of space, or 10?

The files are not smaller, no, but that is a good way to store a lot of easily accessible music files outside of your computer when you don't need to (or can't) have it in there all the time. There's just the minor hassle of making the data file cdrs but they're very convenient eg. good for avoiding having to reburn old cds again.

Even if you imported the 10 albums' worth on a cdr (say 700MB) to get them onto your ipod, you can erase it off your computer as you go if you're worried about space - you would still have the albums easily accessible on the cdr without having to switch on your external hard drive (eg. when online, I never do that myself). I backed up hundreds of albums on data file cdrs one week while I was running out of space and thought external hard drives were still too expensive.

[Otis Westinghouse]

After the humiliation of losing £200 to a thief on eBay and being too slow on the uptake to have got their help when previously attempting to buy an iPod, I'm thinking of treating myself this Christmas (though the recent incessant flow of bills - car repairs, new water tank, damp treatment and replastering, speeding fine - threatens to obliterate Christmas completely). I've been wondering if they change one's patterns of music listening. I tend to go through phases with artists, e.g. I won't listen to EC at all for 3 months, then I'll spend a week listening to nothing but. If shuffle and the removal of physical constraints mean its all there permanently to hand, will I listen to more of a jumble of stuff all the time? I certainly like the idea of 'I want to hear that song right now', and also the 'wow this is amazing, I don't remember hearing it before, who's it by?' The latter will especially happen with Word etc. compilations, I hope. You, or I, at least, tend not to play these CDs after they're current as ... there's always newer ones to listen to. But I can't wait to load them on, put the CDs in storage and rediscover stuff.

What type did you get, MBA? I'm with you on paying a certain percentage more to get wildly more GBs. I've been angered by the slowness of progress here. Digital cameras offer vastly improved features for less cash with each passing year, and yet the era of the cheap but hugely larger capacity MP3 player doesn't seem to ever want to come. It's the industry holding back. they could easily market 80 GB machines for the price of a shuffle and make handsome margins, but they want us to suffer. What seemed a glimmer of hope to me was that the new touch-screen iPods are now the top of the range, and the 'classic' 60/80 (I think) GB ones are now more affordable, c. £200 for 60, I think (bet it would be way cheaper bought in the US right now).

[Boy With A Problem]

I've been wondering if they change one's patterns of music listening.

In my case it has. I tend to put the thing on shuffle. I haven't gotten tired of this in the last couple of years, but I don't listen to albums the way I used to.

Where was the godlike Ronaldo today?

[Otis Westinghouse]

Sore point. My FF captain. Bad mistake, Alex.

[mood swung]

Poke his sore points all you can, BWAP.

though the recent incessant flow of bills - car repairs, new water tank, damp treatment and replastering, speeding fine - threatens to obliterate Christmas completely

I don't WANT to take this off topic, but I feel Otis's pain - I mean, if an ordinary poster can - and ask, where are y'all's gas prices?

[Who Shot Sam?]

Sore point. My FF captain. Bad mistake, Alex.

At least Red Nose took it in stride.

[Tim(e)]

I recently bought a 160gb iPod Classic and loaded my entire collection onto it... now I only have about 16gb of space left on the thing. I hadn't realised that my musi collection was so out of control.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Hey Ms Ordinary Poster...

Poke his sore points all you can, BWAP.

Not entirely charitable, but at least you had the grace t feel my pain.

Talking of which, we also have to replace a large glass pane on the kitchen door where the dog failed to apply his brakes in time racing towards the garden having seen a cat. Moron.

Still, I got it wrong, it's £140 or so for 80 gb on Amazon. 160 gb! Only 16 gb left! Insane!

[Otis Westinghouse]

Spent ages sorting out music on my son's iPod. I was wondering why it seemed to be so full and checked the file types and found lots of stuff we'd imported from CD was AIFF format, about 8 times the file size of MP3. So I deleted the lot, reset the iTunes import preference to MP3 and reimported with loads of other stuff. He now has twice the music for less space. Cool.

Apple refer to the iPods holding '20,000 songs' of 128 kbps AAC kind. If you select MP3, it's 192 Kbps, but only about 10% larger file size. Seems to me it's worth taking up a little more room for the better quality, but would you really notice a difference on the iPod? If not, would you if playing through a good speaker system, e.g. a Bose dock?

I compared the same song in the two formats, and couldn't really detect a difference that probably wasn't just my imagination!

I didn't think iPods handled AIFF/WAV formats, so was surprised to find this was how we'd loaded.

One thing I like having is a CD player that also handles MP3 files, so I can cram loads of bootlegs onto one CD, and still play direct off that CD. Wish I'd known that before burning scores of CDs of full-size WAV files!

[miss buenos aires]

Otis, to belatedly answer your question, right now I feel like I'm listening to old albums that maybe I didn't give enough of a chance to before. Other than that, I'm not seeing a huge effect on my listening patterns. Will update as circumstances develop...

[Otis Westinghouse]

Yes but what about the 128/192 issue?

[miss buenos aires]

Um, what? I think everything on my computer is 128.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Thank you. How many GB did you get, and how much have you used? I can't wait to get one and start loading furiously. Are you using shuffle a lot?

[Otis Westinghouse]

Yes but what about the 128/192 issue?

After my earlier catastrophic naive ripping off on eBay with an iPod, I bit the bullet and ordered an 80 gb classic off Amazon, and am dead excited. At least this time I know it will reach me.

But I remain unsure: should I load everything on as 128 or 192? Will I notice a difference? Switch only seems to convert to 192. in Rainbows downloaded as 160. Elvis' iTunes originals as 192. I'm going to run a test on c. 5 pieces of music at the two speeds to see if I can detect a difference. Any experts care to predict the results?

[Otis Westinghouse]

Needless to say, the internet is alive with debates about this stuff. This one's interesting, and detects no significant difference between 128 AAC (generally favoured over MP3 as being better quality) and 192 MP3, and not even anything significant on 320 MP3. My mind's made up!

[martinfoyle]

My latest mp3 player is the Cowon iAudio 7 and it's great. One thing I've learnt from going through so many players is the importance of a back up so I splashed out on a 500gb external harddrive which I store stuff on first and then transfer to the iAudio. I still think 192kps is the best, 128kps is a bit inferior, though I could be imagining it, it's certainly way better than 64kps. One shortcoming seems to be that it wont play iTunes tracks, I have to burn them to a cdrw and then rip them back. Whatever, I rarely use iTunes. A 16GB player also forces you to change your music more often, I felt less inclined to do this with larger capacity players.

[Otis Westinghouse]

500 gb - I like it! Maybe less on the player and more on the drive is what I'll come to want, but for now I'm just excited about the idea of stuffing shitloads of stuff on the player and not worrying about changing it, just adding to it. At present I'm still listening to my old Discman in bed (I almost always fall asleep listening to music), and it's incredibly temperamental. It often takes 10- goes to get the track you want playing, and then the slightest move and it cuts out. Probably cos it's fallen out of bed one time too many. Anything will be a huge improvement on this. I ordered some £10 Sony 'can' type phones which had a good review as the iPod phones always get such bad press, so will probably find myself waking up in the morning with them still on.

[martinfoyle]

I use these Sennheiser headphones which also double as earplugs, no leakage. The dogs you-know-what, IMO.

[Otis Westinghouse]

I was looking at those and may try in the future. I liked the idea of cans, and the Sony were £4 less with equally glowing plaudits:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-MDRXD100-H ... 665&sr=1-5

[Otis Westinghouse]

I lurrrv my iPod. Hw did I survive so long without one?, etc. Loving surfing through random and discovering whatever and thinking 'oh yeah'! At the moment I have loads of bootlegs in it as they were lurking around waiting to be sorted in some way on my hard drive. I'll delete soon and load my many CDs, but for now I'm quite enjoying them. Headphones are a good way to experience them, get a sense of the sound in the venue.

The Sony cans are great. The 128 kbps AAC sound quality seems decent, though haven't played around and compared with faster rates yet. Tomorrow it goes on its first trip out of the house, all the way to Switzerland then Devon.

My only gripes concern its interaction with iTunes. Various things piss me off:

- I like cover flow, but why do so many records not seem to get any artwork when you check for it? Why, for example, is one CD in a Beethoven box set artwork-compatible and the other four not?

- I don't know if I have a dodgy cable or software, but when I hook up to iTunes it tells me it wasn't correctly ejected last time, although it was. When I move it it often thinks I want to disconnect even though I haven't moved the connecting bits. Today it took me ages to get iTunes to recognise it was connected at all.

- When attached to the computer to recharge, it just shows a lightning bolt on iPod and in iTunes, but it's static, no way of knowing if it's fully recharged or not.

- Worst of all, artists on compilations, e.g. Word magazine ones, show in iTunes on the computer, but aren't searchable on iPod. How come? Surely the two things should be 100% compatible. One of the things I was most looking forward to was loading the 50, 60+ compilation CDs from over the years and then being able to search by artist. Great way to check out samples from people you've read about, etc. No dice. All songs seem searchable.

Any enlightened iPodders who can give me tips or consolation out there would be most welcome!

[Who Shot Sam?]

- I like cover flow, but why do so many records not seem to get any artwork when you check for it? Why, for example, is one CD in a Beethoven box set artwork-compatible and the other four not?

That is an annoyance. So often it's wrong or missing. When I imported a Charles Mingus/Eric Dolphy live double album on Sunday, iTunes located the artwork for disc 1, but not for disc 2. It couldn't locate any artwork at all for Paul Motian's most recent album (hardly obscure).

Other times it simply won't recognize a disc when I load it. If I eject and try again it usually works. Minor annoyances but you'd think Apple would have ironed these things out by now. I guess not.

[miss buenos aires]

You can get the covers on the Internet if iTunes doesn't do it for you. I don't know how to do it, but I know it can be done.