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Me got iPod!

Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 5:01 pm
by Ollie Saunders
I got an iPod yay! 160GBs of gloriousness. 7 hours of video playback or 40 hours of music playback on a single charge. £239.

I had a Zen before, only 20GB and 6 hours battery, no video. I cost around £200 when I bought it, so things have definitely moved on. But despite all those cool specs about the iPod I have to admit the main reason I went looking for a replacement for my Zen was the fact that it wouldn't cope with compilations; my artists list was filled with hundreds of artists containing a single track. I spent hours making amendments to the ID3 tags so that I could achieve some kind of decent findability and the drivers were dodgy, I'd plug it in but it appeared no-one was actually informing the operating system of that fact. Companies really need to learn from Apple, they make sure "just work" and until others are prepared to put the necessary effort and budgets in place for achieve the same nobody is going to be able to compete and that's a shame because I don't particularly like the fact that I just spent 239 quid on a cliché.

Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 10:04 pm
by swiftouch
Congratulations!

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 4:31 am
by Kieran Huggins
Niiiiiiice! Is that for the flight?

Last time I was on a long flight (Toronto -> Taipei: 20hrs!) I forgot to charge my laptop, iPod and PSP. Ten minutes into the flight the announcement comes over the intercom: "Unfortunately the in-flight entertainment system is offline for this flight, sorry for any inconvenience."

If there had been a crying baby I would have jumped for sure.

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 4:41 am
by Ollie Saunders
Niiiiiiice! Is that for the flight?
One use of many.
If there had been a crying baby I would have jumped for sure.
Doh!

I've just found out you can't use it with a Mac and a PC. I plugged it into my Macbook (where I have some music) and sync'd it and then into my PC (where I have most of it) and it said I have to format it first! The cheek!

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 1:47 pm
by neophyte
Congratulations. I've been looking for a music player that supports ogg. Anybody know of a good player?

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 6:55 pm
by Ollie Saunders
Can't you get firmware upgrades for some players to support additional formats. Is the iPod included? I should really know, but I don't

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 9:04 pm
by Kieran Huggins
I actually keep two forks of my music collection, one in vorbis, the other in iTunes (aac) - each ripped from CD/WAV

@neophyte: http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 11:46 am
by RobertGonzalez
Congrats. iAnything is cool right about now.

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 12:17 pm
by Ollie Saunders
Kieran Huggins wrote:I actually keep two forks of my music collection, one in vorbis, the other in iTunes (aac) - each ripped from CD/WAV

@neophyte: http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers
Why do you do that? What rippers do you use?

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 3:43 pm
by Kieran Huggins
I'm keeping my options open. I started using vorbis before iTunes even existed, and I seeded my initial iTunes collection from transcoded vorbis (the vast majority of which have since been replaced as described below).

I used to use the vorbis branch as my primary music source, but since getting my first iPod I've been iTunes-centric.

Call it "insurance" in case of licensing stupidness. It doesn't really take all that much space, and it adds only one step to the import process.

The process:

I either download FLAC audio from a lossless tracker, or have a CD to start from.

Next, I transcode FLAC to WAV (it's FAST), mount the WAVs via a CUE file as a virtual CD.

To AAC: open iTunes, import album.

To vorbis: open DBPowerAmp CD Ripper, rip to vorbis.