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beware ipod

My inital experience with the new 40gb ipod was excellent but the honeymoon is over! The unit has completely died after only several weeks of use. Numerous glitches forced me to constantly "reboot" the unit until it stopped working completely. Battery life never came close to the claimed eight hours, plus you are unable to back-up audio files from the ipod thanks to apple becoming a lackey for the music industry. I really feel like I have been taken to the cleaners on this purchase. I spent the better part of a week loading .wav files onto the unit and to have it completely crash so quickly means that apple obviously has some quality issues. The ipod is based on an off the shelf Toshiba hardrive that retails for a couple of hundred dollars so you are paying apple for the interface and the cute plastic box. I love electronics and have spent a fortune on them over the years but no purchase has been such a huge disappointment. Avoid the temptation to buy what seems like a great unit. Steven Jobs has no clothes.
ntscdan

Showing 2 responses by ultraviolet

ultraviolet
105 posts
 
I'm on my 3rd 30GB ipod. This one's working well though. When they work they're great, when they don't... Sounds like you're using USB 1.1 if it's taking you that long to load music onto your ipod. Get a USB 2 card or FireWire and your life will get much easier.

Also, the ipod is advertised as an mp3 player which is also capable of playing wavs. However, you cannot expect to get the advertised battery life when playing wavs. The ipod has a 32mb buffer I believe. This is adequate for mp3's, but not large enough for wavs. Because of this your hard drive will constantly be spinning up to read and your battery life will plummet. This is not unique to the ipod. I don't know of another HD player with a larger buffer so all players will suffer the same result (although most players do have better battery life than the ipod to begin with). I highly recommend alt-preset-standard VBR mp3's made with EAC and LAME mp3 decoder. On an ipod, there is absolutely no sound difference (this is with Senn 600's and ety's).
ultraviolet
105 posts
 
Ntscdan, before dismissing current portable music players altogether, seriously try out the method of encoding mp3's that I mentioned. I cannot tell the difference on my ipod with any headphone I have tried to date. I cannot tell the difference in the car (after being converted back to wav). And, in a double blind test on my home stereo (also playing wavs converted from alt-pres-stnd VBR mp3's) I barely got a statistically significant result. Oddly enough, the ones I could differentiate, was because of a volume disparity between mp3 and original pressed cd--don't know why.

Also, check this out for more interesting information.

http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusicclassical/mp3test.html

The mp3 encoding method I use is far superior to anything used in these tests.

I was the biggest basher of the mp3 format. I have heard (and still do) appallingly bad mp3's. The fact is, mp3 is lossy compression--but there are ways to encode for it that minimize (most times eliminate) audible differences. If you can get over the theoretical shortfalls and honestly evaluate it done correctly in practicle application, I think you'll find there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from them.
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