[roebeet]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Agnostic /img/forum/go_quote.gif Anyway I've decided to stay away from Apple products until they change their business practices. At the moment they are worse than Microsoft with their disgusting vendor lock in and proprietary crap games.

I think Microsoft are just as bad as Apple, in this area. The Zune has some nice features, and I've read that the SQ is quite good. But, the lack of Vorbis / FLAC support + the Zune software requirement to sync just killed any chance of me purchasing one. Why can't MS / Apple support drag and drop, like everybody else? Is that so hard? And why is it so hard to add royalty-free codecs? Sandisk seems to have no problem with doing this.

 

[DJGeorgeT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by roebeet /img/forum/go_quote.gif I think Microsoft are just as bad as Apple, in this area. The Zune has some nice features, and I've read that the SQ is quite good. But, the lack of Vorbis / FLAC support + the Zune software requirement to sync just killed any chance of me purchasing one. Why can't MS / Apple support drag and drop, like everybody else? Is that so hard? And why is it so hard to add royalty-free codecs? Sansa seems to have no problem with doing this.

sandisk does not have an elitist complex this is why their players are ugly and look cheap, they are cheap! relatively speaking. But sound great!

 

[qusp]

Quote:

Itunes is a complete resource hog and a totally unresponsive program. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to boot it up in windows. Itunes keeps bothing with does annoying updates. Do you want to update your ipod? Do you want to update to itunes version 8.x. No, I dont want that because it will take a ridiculous amount of time since the program is already hogging all my memory of my computer. Even clicking on anything in itunes has a few moments of lag. Itunes is extremely confusing and annoying to use even after 3 years of experience. This is coming from a guy who used sonic stage for years to burn music on minidiscs. Manually syncing your ipod is not ideal since itunes is unresponsive but doing it automaticly is even worse. Plug your into another computer and it syncs with the ipod with that library and all your songsare gone! Remove any of your songs from the harddisc and itunes will keep annoying you that it cannot find this file while syncing. Format your hdd and itunes will give you huge problems. You cannot rip music from your ipod to your hdd either. Itunes uses proprietary codecs. I cannot import flac files. I have to convert them to wav first using foobar2000 then convert them to ALAC and manually adjust the id3 tags. And it took me a while to figure out how to convert them to ALAC too!

funny that it runs like a dream on my mac I wonder what the problem could be??hmmm could it be the crap memory handling of windows?? or your windows in particular; because thats just not right ive used itunes on many Pc's and never had anythng like the problems you mention. I find itunes to be exceedingly easy to use (my grandmother can use itunes

); its almost transparent to me. and about the no flac support; can you play alac in media player ??? I dont think so.

apples proprietary nature is annoying sometimes and yes there business practices are sometimes suspect, but to say they are worse than microsoft!!! pleeeeeasse be real. unfortunately its apples proprietary nature of doing things that makes the computers themselves so stable; i'm happy not being able to use some minor and not so necessary to me software if it means that I havent had a mac virus EVER in over 20yrs of use and the fact that my computer has been on now constantly for over 3 months without the need for a to restart or a crash of any kind. and I play pretty close to the edge of my 4gb of memory regularly.

oh and at least mac os asks if you want to update your software

windows just does it whether you want to or not, I know what id prefer.

apple's products are by no mean perfect, but as far as support is concerned you will find a whole heap of smaller DAPs that wont even work with macos let alone well; Hell most of the big companies dont support macos how does it feel guys??. its the whole package that makes it worthwhile for me; although i've changed almost everything about it. firmware, output stage, battery, storage but thats the thing, its so open to customization, it may be proprietary, but its very easy to change it in the way that you like it, because the market is so huuuge that there are so many products to use with it.

oh and to the OP AFAIK the 4G nano is a CL chip. I think its only the iphone and touch that are wolfston now.

oh and zeph I never said the iphone 3G was the best HP out; i said it was the best of the apple line didn't I?? at least thats what I normally say, I may have omitted that this time. if so thats what I meant.

all this is my opinion and experience. yours may be different. I dont go around bashing other brands; even though there are clearly faults with them. why even participate in a thread that doesn't interest you I say. anyway on with my day.

 

[PeterDLai]

Quote:

Originally Posted by qusp /img/forum/go_quote.gif oh and to the OP AFAIK the 4G nano is a CL chip. I think its only the iphone and touch that are wolfston now.

If Wikipedia has it right (which of course is not saying much for accuracy), it appears that the 4G Nano uses Wolfson as well with the only two exceptions in the iPod lineup being the iPod classic (6G) and iPod shuffle.

I guess Wolfson decided after its 25% drop that they needed the Apple contract and somehow convinced Apple to change their minds. I guess the end result is Apple hiding the Wolfson branding on their own chips (search for "WM6180C" on that page). I wonder how they determined the Wolfson model number? If you search "WM6180C" on Google, all the results that come up pretty much are sites with information derived from this one report. There's no information about the characteristics of properties of this codec. If this one report is wrong (I'm not saying it is), then the wrong information spread far across the Internet.

<begin highly doubtful conspiracy theory>
Wolfson lost its contract with Apple, hurts financially, but is bribing Apple to disguise the new DAC under Apple branding (which is actually made by Cirrus Logic) and to stay quiet about who actually manufactures it. Wolfson tries to save face by having one site declare that Apple is continuing to use their chips, but with secret codenames (e.g. WM6180C, where the C actually stands for Cirrus Logic). This one site is believed to be true by the rest of the world as Wolfson's stock rises.
</end>

I had fun with that.

 

[roebeet]

Quote:

Originally Posted by qusp /img/forum/go_quote.gif apples proprietary nature is annoying sometimes and yes there business practices are sometimes suspect, but to say they are worse than microsoft!!! pleeeeeasse be real.

Sorry, but I don't agree, at least from a DAP perspective. Lack of support for free codecs (especially for a popular one like FLAC), the lack of drag and drop, the need to lock down players to sync with only certain computers, and of course the dreaded DRM that still infests the iTunes store. As for iTunes itself, it is a resource hog on Windows, but at least they support the competitor's OS (not that they really had a choice).

I guess I can't blame either company for doing the things that they do, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it, either. I don't own an iPod anymore and I don't own a Zune. And that will continue to be the case as long as there are alternatives out there.

As for MacOS DAP support, just choose a player that supports MSC mode (like Cowon or Sandisk - again, two excellent DAP makers).

 

[Currawong]

Quote:

Originally Posted by montell /img/forum/go_quote.gif Itunes is a complete resource hog and a totally unresponsive program. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to boot it up in windows. Itunes keeps bothing with does annoying updates. Do you want to update your ipod? Do you want to update to itunes version 8.x. No, I dont want that because it will take a ridiculous amount of time since the program is already hogging all my memory of my computer. Even clicking on anything in itunes has a few moments of lag.

Something else is going on here. I've not observed this on iTunes on a clean Windows XP or Vista install. I've known XP to bog down over time though.

Quote:

Plug your into another computer and it syncs with the ipod with that library and all your songsare gone! Remove any of your songs from the harddisc and itunes will keep annoying you that it cannot find this file while syncing.

Funny that. Would you rather get confused as to why some of the songs on your iPod are missing?

Quote:

Format your hdd and itunes will give you huge problems. You cannot rip music from your ipod to your hdd either. Itunes uses proprietary codecs.

No, because Apple would be seen as allowing the illegal copying of music if you could move songs from computer to ipod to another computer. It took them 2 years of constant negotiations to get any of the music companies to agree to the iTunes Music Store. Can you think what the reaction was to the iPod from those companies, especially if free copying between devices was allowed?

Quote:

I cannot import flac files.

See below, but I gather there's a plug-in or two that allows this. I suggest converting them, if you're going to do so, to AIFF, as WAV files don't have tagging as AIFF files do. Losing the tagging is a pain.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Agnostic /img/forum/go_quote.gif Anyway I've decided to stay away from Apple products until they change their business practices. At the moment they are worse than Microsoft with their disgusting vendor lock in and proprietary crap games.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roebeet /img/forum/go_quote.gif Sorry, but I don't agree, at least from a DAP perspective. Lack of support for free codecs (especially for a popular one like FLAC), the lack of drag and drop, the need to lock down players to sync with only certain computers, and of course the dreaded DRM that still infests the iTunes store. As for iTunes itself, it is a resource hog on Windows, but at least they support the competitor's OS (not that they really had a choice).

Edit: Deleted as what I wrote about FLAC's licence was wrong.

The "Vendor lock-in" has more to do with the music companies than anything. Apple just can't be seen to be allowing any possibility of sharing music files. Anyhow, I don't see how it's a problem being restricted to using iTunes to organise everything (montell's problems notwithstanding) unless you purely don't like iTunes. The other, less obvious reason that Apple lock down the software used for syncing the iPod is to prevent problems. Apple are scrutinised very heavily for every mistake they make, even small ones, so they not only do their best to make things easy to use, but also hard to break.

Back on topic though, after reading this thread, I might take some headphones into the Apple Store with my 5G video iPod and compare the SQ with the Classic 6.5G, if they'll let me use my own music.

 

[ZephyrSapphire]

Qusp. I didn't read through the whole thread. I only read the OP's first post and posts which were asking me something. So I don't know what you're talking about

Can't be bothered reading through.

That said. I enjoy my iPod Touch for playing games as well. Super Monkey Ball ROCKS!

 

[DJGeorgeT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Currawong /img/forum/go_quote.gif FLAC can't be supported by default as the licence FLAC uses prevents it from being included with a closed-source program.

FLAC license does not prevent Apple or anyone from implementing it into their devices even if the firmware is not open source.

And I quote from FLAC: "The FLAC and Ogg FLAC formats themselves, and their specifications, are fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance). They are free for commercial or noncommercial use. That means that commercial developers may independently write FLAC or Ogg FLAC software which is compatible with the specifications for no charge and without restrictions of any kind. There are no licensing fees or royalties of any kind for use of the formats or their specifications, or for distributing, selling, or streaming media in the FLAC or Ogg FLAC formats.

The FLAC project also makes available software that implements the formats, which is distributed according to Open Source licenses as follows:

The reference implementation libraries are licensed under the New BSD License. In simple terms, these libraries may be used by any application, Open or proprietary, linked or incorporated in whole, so long as acknowledgement is made to Xiph.org Foundation when using the source code in whole or in derived works. The Xiph License is free enough that the libraries have been used in commercial products to implement FLAC, including in the firmware of hardware devices where other Open Source licenses can be problematic. "

You should run for office and be a full time politician, you sure know how to spin...

 

[qusp]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZephyrSapphire /img/forum/go_quote.gif Qusp. I didn't read through the whole thread. I only read the OP's first post and posts which were asking me something. So I don't know what you're talking about Can't be bothered reading through. That said. I enjoy my iPod Touch for playing games as well. Super Monkey Ball ROCKS!

its all good mate no beef here

obviously I didn't read the whole thread either and thought you were referring to me when you made the comment about the iphone HP out not being the best one available. I had just said that it was one of the best apple HP outs.

oh and I was just assuming that the nano used a CL chip TBH because the last one was wasnt it?? TBH I dont really follow all the tech stuff for everything and only keep in touch with info that effects me or my equipment and only start to do research again when its time to upgrade. I had read that apple was discontinuing the use of wolfston chips for its regular ipod line and it came to be; at least for a generation so I assumed it was a CL in the nano 4G as the new classic was a CL. Ifixit would be able to tell you and perhaps ilounge.

 

[Currawong]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DJGeorgeT /img/forum/go_quote.gif You should run for office and be a full time politician, you sure know how to spin...

And you know how to insult. My mistake then, I thought FLAC used the GPL. I'll correct my original post.

 

[Agnostic]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Currawong /img/forum/go_quote.gif Something else is going on here. I've not observed this on iTunes on a clean Windows XP or Vista install. I've known XP to bog down over time though.

Try J.River Media Center, you'll see how slow Itunes really is on windows. Itunes has been getting a little bit better but it's still a slow system hog.

Quote:

No, because Apple would be seen as allowing the illegal copying of music if you could move songs from computer to ipod to another computer. It took them 2 years of constant negotiations to get any of the music companies to agree to the iTunes Music Store. Can you think what the reaction was to the iPod from those companies, especially if free copying between devices was allowed?

So they cripple their player in order to be able to sell you (overpriced lossy) music through their store. In their own proprietary format of course so people will be unlikely to switch once they've started buying, nobody wants to loose the ability to play music they've bought. And guess which pmp you need to play that format?

Quote:

The "Vendor lock-in" has more to do with the music companies than anything. Apple just can't be seen to be allowing any possibility of sharing music files. Anyhow, I don't see how it's a problem being restricted to using iTunes to organise everything (montell's problems notwithstanding) unless you purely don't like iTunes. The other, less obvious reason that Apple lock down the software used for syncing the iPod is to prevent problems. Apple are scrutinised very heavily for every mistake they make, even small ones, so they not only do their best to make things easy to use, but also hard to break.

So Apple sells their phones through exclusive carrier contracts because that's required by the music companies? Or is that because they are scrutinised so heavily that they have to? Poor Apple, they really have a tough time huh, maybe if I stop scrutinising them they'll change their act?

Seriously, come on! I can imagine you like Itunes, the Ipod, or the Iphone but don't make it out like Apple's business practices are forced upon them by others. It's their very modus operandi and it's been getting worse and worse these last years with their growing succes. The closer you get to being a monopolist the easier it gets to play these dirty anti-competitive games to the disadvantage of your own paying customers. Apple is all about control and that includes the control of your behaviour when it comes to how you use Apples products.

 

[BloodSugar00]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZephyrSapphire /img/forum/go_quote.gif Mammoth capacity wouldn't really be a plus since the Zune has the same capacity now. Lol. Seems like ALL the Trekstor Vibez are vapourware atm. Been updating myself about it since midyear and even the 8 and 16GB models are still unavailable.

I suppose. Depends how you look at it. I'd say, given, on memory capacity, Microsoft/Zune are Apple/Ipods only competitor, and that Zune follows pretty much identical restrictive and propietary business practices with their DAPs/audio gear to Apple, that it is still a viable positive and attractive feature that Ipod Classics have such a large meory capacity. All the rest of the competitiom, Creative Zen now included, don't do huge hard-drive memory based players. It's all Flash-based that is restricted to 16-32GB core memory, ie without memory card expansion in place/use. In this regard, as choosing between Apple and Zune poses the pretty much the same bunch of disadvantages, I'd still say this a valid lure, as it's not like Zune has drag and drop or whatever that Apple doesn't to steal more of the prospective customer base; they both offer pretty much the same, just an alternative brand. Anyway, it doesn't really matter.

I'd class mammoth memory as a key attractive feature and you would not.

N.B.// Also, I completely forgot when typing the above, the Zune range isn't yet available within the UK.

Yeah, I couldn't order the 16GB Trekstor to try in this batch of players I've ordered because, as you say, they've temporarily ceased productin of the model all together. I was interested in that player. Still would be when it hits the market again.

 

[BloodSugar00]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dura /img/forum/go_quote.gif The discrepance for the OP in what (s)he hears and reads might be caused by this: . 2 years ago there were some measurementsgraphs on the net that showed ipods had a severe bassrolloff into low impedeance headphones. This might result in what I experienced in past ipods as an unpleasant shrill and flat sound. (a big disappointment btw, I wanted to like ipods a lot, and still do, I think f.i. the new nano looks gorgeous). Let me be clear: I've yet the hear the ipod the OP refers to but if that familytrait still exists in ipods the added resistor would be a cure for the very problem that some had with the SQ.

Although I didn't detail it as you have done there, the reason I noted the use of the adaptor was for the purpose that you have gone on to reason and speculate. Thanks for doin so though!

 

[BloodSugar00]

Quote:

Originally Posted by i_don't_know /img/forum/go_quote.gif I just don't like the way they sound. All iPods I've heard seem to have this very "digital" sound to them. Like, I just can't get into the music for some reason. My S639F, which I just received yesterday, sounds fantastic. It has both thump and sparkle, all coupled together with great detail and some pretty good (but not quite astonishing) soundstage. I couldn't stop listening to the crappy preloaded music that came with it last night. I hated the music, but it sounded so good! And the included IEMs are kind of "cheap" sounding. They're quite a bit better than iBuds, though.

I understand what you're saying there and can see how you describe the ipod sound as sounding more 'digital'. That is a good way of putting it actually; that veil, that coluration I was trying to describe as assigned to the ipod sound signature, that marries up with more digital sound you depict. It just doesn't leave the impression of being so strong and detracting or ruining as you feel it to me. I see it more as as a dampening, slightly coluring, veil that is quite distinctive to this DAP's sound. It doesn't detract from enjoying the music for me. But nobody's the same and our mileages are just varying here I think, similar to syctheavatar.

 

[Kicksonrt66]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Currawong /img/forum/go_quote.gif The "Vendor lock-in" has more to do with the music companies than anything. Apple just can't be seen to be allowing any possibility of sharing music files.

Not that I'm a fan of cumbersome DRM, but that's no reason not to have itunes/ipod be able to handle other schemes like Rhapsody. Locking in your customers is the reason.

One of the complaints was not being able to reload your computer from the ipod in case you have to format the HD (or maybe the comp goes dead and you have to buy a new one). Does Itunes (like 2 other online music vendors I use) keep a record of your purchases so you can download the whole lot again if you need to?

If you had a normal disk backup, is there a procedure for getting the license to work if you have to load everything to a new computer? (assuming you have just the backup, not a working old computer)