[tvhead]

Despite all my bitching in the other thread, I ended up buying the iPod anyway.

It's pretty cool.

 

[MacDEF]

Congrats! I wish I had the funds right now

Even though I'm a huge MD fan, this is the first MP3 player that has interested me; I'd like to try it out.

 

[Odin]

Everytime I come here I see someone getting something new, and I'm just sitting here

. I seriously need a new job, so I can get more hours and more $$$

 

[sapphiremodena]

We seem to be thinkin' the exact same stuff all the time, Odin!
Hopefully I plan to get a job for Xmas break, but Xmas will pass and i'll still never have submitted any resumes.
Man, it sucks to be lazy!

 

[lextek]

You made a good choice.

Bob

 

[tvhead]

Lextek,

My new home is the Apple.com iPod forum. Now I am informed of all the iPod's shortcomings.. hah!

I'm not sure if I should use a case with it or carry it naked. Right now it's in this oversized pouch. BTW, I somehow managed to get a few fine scratches on the steel back.

 

[lextek]

Looks better naked. I store it, carry hiking in a Case-Logic MD case.
http://www.jrhillandcompany.com/ makes a couple of cases. I might order the cheaper one. I don't like the looks of the sleeve. I'm ripping some CD's at 192 VBR while the turkey is cooking. The iPod sounds great with an Airhead.

Bob

 

[tvhead]

Have you had any problems with vbr compressed mp3s acting weird?

 

[lextek]

Don't know yet. The iPod is upstairs playing 13 hours of christmas carols @160 through the home system. It took 3 minutes to download the tunes. Wow.


Bob

 

[joelongwood]

Congrats on the iPod purchase, tvhead. It's an incredible piece of equipment. My son is here for Thanksgiving and brought along his iPod. It's the first time I've seen it first hand.....AWESOME!!! It is definitely one of the coolest, most elegant looking pieces of audio equipment out there. To my ears, however, the earbuds that come with it, while they look good, are pretty lame ......hyped bass with muffled highs. I hooked it up in turn to the Sony E888 earbuds and Etymotic ER-4s and the sound improved dramatically in both cases. However, the sound really opened up when I plugged the iPod into a JMT Penguin amp first.....much more dynamic sounding. My son uses variable bit rate encoding between 128 and 192, and there were times that I could sense the lower bit rate. The music just didn't have the fullness it should....the high end tended to be a bit harsh. When I get my iPod, hopefully by next weekend, I think I'll be happier having less music stored but having higher quality AIFF(?) files.
Again, best of luck with your new toy!

 

[tvhead]

Joelongwood,

Though I haven't put any aiff files on my ipod yet, I have heard it makes the ipod's hard drive spin a lot more often which makes sense. The files are a lot bigger. r3mix.net, a website Joe Bloggs told me about, has some interesting information on the subject of mp3 quality. "MP3@256 was rated to have the same music quality as cd" in a blind listening test involving 300 "audiophiles." Who knows.

 

[chych]

tvhead, a lot of the information from r3mix's site, such as that blind test, is incredibly incredible... just follow their mp3 encoding advice, everything else is... wrong...

 

[tvhead]

Thanks for the heads up. It seems like it more applies to windows users, anyway. I don't even know if I can find a LAME encoder (is that like saying HIV virus?) for the mac. I like the convenience of iTunes and use the encoding information on r3mix.net as a guideline for my preferences in iTunes.

 

[joelongwood]

Quote:

I don't even know if I can find a LAME encoder (is that like saying HIV virus?) for the mac.

Try this:go to http://www.macdigitalaudio.com
Go to Software link. In there, you can find links to various mp3 software. Under converting/encoding you will find links to Dropmp3 which is a free mp3 encoder that uses LAME and a link to N2MP3 Pro which is a commercial program that encodes many different ways, including LAME. Hope this helps.

 

[chych]

iTunes uses the Fraunhoffer codec, which too is quite good, and even Mike Walker seems to say it's great at 192kbps.

I use n2mp3 for my encoding though since it does LAME (which is pronounced as one word).