Do i want an ipod for christmas?

[autopilot]

All have their flaws, but for me personally the iPod has the biggest flaw; What good is an ipod when some 80-100 CD's of mine cant be played back properly?

I put on a dance mix CD, but every 'track' has a 2 second gap of silence after it that's not there on the CD. I play a CD of live gig - hold on, I'm sure that live gig did not have a second pause of nothingness every 5 mins or so. The same goes for audio books too, it completely ruins the experience for me. Even the latest faithless CD is not mixed, but a few tracks 'blend' into the next. There are even Beatles and pink Floyd albums the iPod cant play properly. We had gapless playback in the days of vynil, through to tapes and then CD's. Why not on our ipods? It's a VERY easy technology to implement - Sony have nailed it with ATRAC+ (only if you rip from directly CD though i think).

It's a joke really and THE reason why i wont (cant) buy an ipod.

http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

http://www.petitiononline.com/13421509/petition.html

[herulach]

All have their flaws, but for me personally the iPod has the biggest flaw; What good is an ipod when some 80-100 CD's of mine cant be played back properly?

I put on a dance mix CD, but every 'track' has a 2 second gap of silence after it that's not there on the CD. I play a CD of live gig - hold on, I'm sure that live gig did not have a second pause of nothingness every 5 mins or so. The same goes for audio books too, it completely ruins the experience for me. Even the latest faithless CD is not mixed, but a few tracks 'blend' into the next. There are even Beatles and pink Floyd albums the iPod cant play properly. We had gapless playback in the days of vynil, through to tapes and then CD's. Why not on our ipods? It's a VERY easy technology to implement - Sony have nailed it with ATRAC+ (only if you rip from directly CD though i think).

It's a joke really and THE reason why i wont (cant) buy an ipod.

http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

http://www.petitiononline.com/13421509/petition.html

No Players support gapless mp(the three on this keyboard doesnt work) (that im aware of) the gaps arent huge enough to annoy me on my zen, but they are definately there. As will they be on your pc, assuming you havent ripped to 1 big mp and set up .cue files for each one.

As for it being easy to implement, yes it is, but not with mp(the three on this keyboard doesnt work)s, which are 'gappy' by their very nature.

[autopilot]

No Players support gapless mp(the three on this keyboard doesnt work) (that im aware of) the gaps arent huge enough to annoy me on my zen, but they are definately there. As will they be on your pc, assuming you havent ripped to 1 big mp and set up .cue files for each one.

As for it being easy to implement, yes it is, but not with mp(the three on this keyboard doesnt work)s, which are 'gappy' by their very nature.

Actually the Sony players DO support gapless playback, even on the HD1. As for it being imposible for MP3 to be played gapless, actually it's more than posible. You can rip to a single file and use a CUE sheet. You can already play a long file on an ipod etc, but its pointless without CUE sheet support. It's a dead simple method and the new Rio was going to support it before they went bust. Also i believe both Iriver and Creative have mentioned it, but have not done anything yet. My squeezebox supports it. It's THE best method of ripping a CD. Apple's aproach is basically - get stuffed.

However, gapless playback can be achieved with MP3 now even with single files - the LAME encoder supports ripping without the padding frames old style MP3 rippers added which made things tricky. That said, the player would still need to be able to play them gaplessly too. But that MP3, the better formats such as Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Wavepack etc have supported it from the begining. Does the iPod support any of those? No. Why? DRM issues mainly. Apple want to force people into to own apple player forever. All those people who buy from Itunes are in for a shock when they find out they can't play thier music on a non-apple product heh.

Ok, I'm going off at a tangent here, but basically get with the program Apple!

how come the ipods get top marks in reviews then? i aks because im looking at getting one for christmas myself

Because most reviewers dont seem to completely understand the technology and never sctratch deeper then the shiney white little surface.

But they all have issues. I'm not a Apple hater per say, they make loverly gear, but i would not buy an iPod. If you think gapless playback is not an issue for you, think angain. It will at some point to some degree. But TBH, there is not one DAP on the market i really want.

[TheAnimus]

HD3, HD5 all support gapless playback. If i've bought a mixed CD i want to hear it that way dagnabbit!.

(classic example, track 1 to track 2, on hold your colour, pendulum, who i'm fan boying at the moment... this is how i beg to ask, what extra features do you get on an iPod, last time i looked u didn't get gfx equalisation (good for cheap in ear headphones)).

[nvening]

BTW, every labs test which includes the HD5, the HD5 always wins.

[herulach]

Actually the Sony players DO support gapless playback, even on the HD1. As for it being imposible for MP3 to be played gapless, actually it's more than posible. You can rip to a single file and use a CUE sheet. You can already play a long file on an ipod etc, but its pointless without CUE sheet support. It's a dead simple method and the new Rio was going to support it before they went bust. Also i believe both Iriver and Creative have mentioned it, but have not done anything yet. My squeezebox supports it. It's THE best method of ripping a CD. Apple's aproach is basically - get stuffed.

However, gapless playback can be achieved with MP3 now even with single files - the LAME encoder supports ripping without the padding frames old style MP3 rippers added which made things tricky. That said, the player would still need to be able to play them gaplessly too. But that MP3, the better formats such as Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Wavepack etc have supported it from the begining. Does the iPod support any of those? No. Why? DRM issues mainly. Apple want to force people into to own apple player forever. All those people who buy from Itunes are in for a shock when they find out they can't play thier music on a non-apple product heh.

Ok, I'm going off at a tangent here, but basically get with the program Apple!



Because most reviewers dont seem to completely understand the technology and never sctratch deeper then the shiney white little surface.

But they all have issues. I'm not a Apple hater per say, they make loverly gear, but i would not buy an iPod. If you think gapless playback is not an issue for you, think angain. It will at some point to some degree. But TBH, there is not one DAP on the market i really want.

Youll note i neither said it was impossible (just that you cant do it on portable players for mp3):

No Players support gapless mp(the three on this keyboard doesnt work) (that im aware of)

Im aware of cue sheets, as i mentioned, however, until personal players support it im left with 2 options, by a sony play and rip to atrac (Would probably be about 2 days of cpu time at least) or have 2 seperate music collections, tbh, i cba.

[autopilot]

Im aware of cue sheets, as i mentioned, however, until personal players support it im left with 2 options, by a sony play and rip to atrac (Would probably be about 2 days of cpu time at least) or have 2 seperate music collections, tbh, i cba.

Yeah, but for people taking their first dip in the murky waters of DAP's it's something that people should be aware of, especially the dance music fans, but everyone really. Yet it rarely gets talked about in 'which player' debates or even professional review sites/magazines that really should know better.

In fact you don't even need CUE sheets, even with MP3, just need to play the files back-to-back with no delay and make sure files were encoded properly which is not hard; dont include any padding frames like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC and many others have been doing since they were born.

[TheAnimus]

herulach, for my sony, i got pissed off with having insainly high bit rate (20gig suddenly becomes not enough when you get into a "new" genra or something).

So i unpacked everything to WAVE using dbpoweramp.

It took only 4days to convert some 60gig of lossless music to atrac. I did this before going back to parents for a weekend. Once converted it transfered to the device really quickly. (I of course had the player with me).

This is always a problem i find with players, with my stupidly expensive headphones, i can't hear the suttle high frequncies when i'm drifting away to elgar on the "silent" part of the train (i always listen to my pmp on the train in that carrage given the chance, no one else can hear it, so i don't think i'm been bad). So an Atrac3plus (which really isn't a bad codec imo) compressed to 112kbps is really exceptable. So i decided i wanted all my pmp music at that quality. A mate has a seperate WMA 64kbps collection for his player.

Its worth noting the sony software isn't capable of been multi proccessor. So it takes twice as long as need be to convert music format. I've yet to find some software that takes advantage of SMP systems

With all players i'd recomend using them on that "spare" computer so you can leave it crunching all night, when you first get your player, you'll want to put SO much music on it, as soon as u decide (like i did) that you want a fixed bit rate, it will obviously take some time. This is always a pain in the arse. I keep a spare mini-itx system (cost me £100 to build) and its this sort of thing is whats its best for. Its one of those ugly things no owner tells you about (like ripping your CDs the first time.... don't ever use the software that comes with your player for this!).

[herulach]

herulach, for my sony, i got pissed off with having insainly high bit rate (20gig suddenly becomes not enough when you get into a "new" genra or something).

So i unpacked everything to WAVE using dbpoweramp.

It took only 4days to convert some 60gig of lossless music to atrac. I did this before going back to parents for a weekend. Once converted it transfered to the device really quickly. (I of course had the player with me).

This is always a problem i find with players, with my stupidly expensive headphones, i can't hear the suttle high frequncies when i'm drifting away to elgar on the "silent" part of the train (i always listen to my pmp on the train in that carrage given the chance, no one else can hear it, so i don't think i'm been bad). So an Atrac3plus (which really isn't a bad codec imo) compressed to 112kbps is really exceptable. So i decided i wanted all my pmp music at that quality. A mate has a seperate WMA 64kbps collection for his player.

Its worth noting the sony software isn't capable of been multi proccessor. So it takes twice as long as need be to convert music format. I've yet to find some software that takes advantage of SMP systems

With all players i'd recomend using them on that "spare" computer so you can leave it crunching all night, when you first get your player, you'll want to put SO much music on it, as soon as u decide (like i did) that you want a fixed bit rate, it will obviously take some time. This is always a pain in the arse. I keep a spare mini-itx system (cost me £100 to build) and its this sort of thing is whats its best for. Its one of those ugly things no owner tells you about (like ripping your CDs the first time.... don't ever use the software that comes with your player for this!).

I dont have it in lossless though, thats the point, most of it was ripped back in the day before i really got into the audiophile stuff, so the majority is 160kbps mp3,