Latest iPod Configuration -- Any New Hope?

Ultraviolet

Your point about headphones is curiously counterintuitive to me.

Shouldn't transducers just next to, or even IN, our ears be capable of resolving fine detail and differences? I have never liked them, but dont many audiophiles go on and on about their Sennheiser 600s or whatever? The pros them in the studio during mastering blah blah blah?

Of course one way to test thsi theory is to simply run this iPod type stuff into your big rig.

As you can read in another one of my threads on this same subject, I found the difference between WAV and MP-3 files wasy to discern EVEN IN MY CAR. A PORSCHE. CONVERTIBLE. WITH AN ILLEGAL STAINLESS STEEL EXHAUST?!?!?!?!?!?! We're not talking Maybach here.

(Not sure what the exact MP3 settings were but I did use the geeky EAC and LAME encoder.)

So to respond to the points above about driving motorcycles and horrible signal to noise ratios, I disagree.

No offense, but maybe those posters could save a lot of money on audio equipment and not care.

I dont think I have the worlds most golden ears, but I have been at this for about 25 years and I am well tuned into the differences of good and bad audio.

I once heard an audio salesman in the 70's complimenting the allegedly golden ears of one of his colleagues, saying the "trick" was "knowing what to listen for".

Isnt that a bit like saying the "trick" to expert wine tasting is to not be suffering from a cold and congestion?

A lower noise floor - of course - contributes to a greater sense of dynamics, a greater sense of detail etc.

But I dont need perfect dead silence, the worlds greatest speakers or some gifted ability to "know what to listen for" to detect a hard edged, strident, fatiguing, compressed sound being blasted directly into my ears.

If you brought a lawnmower into your listening room while cranking your analogue and vacuum tubes, it wouldnt make your stereo sound BAD?!?! It would just add noise.

So with headphones, on a motorcycle, in an airplane -- I still wish these things sounded better, but despite the progress which has been made its still all processed cheese to me.

Here are some suggestions:
Rip all your music using EAC FLAC -> convert to WMA lossless -> Apple lossless. (Delete WMA lossless afterward)

This ensures perfect CD ripping and you can keep all the files in an open format and still use iPod. Need a lot of HD space though.

Get an iPod line out add-on. It's about $30. Basically hooks up to the bottom of the ipod connectors. Hook that up to a decent portable headphone. Then, pick up your favorite headphones. For example, Senn HD650 for quiet room and Eytmotic ER-4 for airplanes. Total price: $1500.

This headphone system should rival a regular audiophile stereo system under $10-20k easily.

Hi Folks, I just got my I-pod a few days ago so I'm way behind on the tech talk. I started loading songs from CD to i-tunes, then over to the ipod. After i loaded about 40 cd's I erased them off I-tunes as not to bog down my comupter. The next time I up-loaded to my i-pod it erased the 40 cd's that I spent 2-days loading. What are you folks doing, leaving all your stuff on I tunes? I have about 600 cd's and that's a lot of memory(40 gig?)

Please advise

More dumb questions to follow,

Thanks!

Hi Glen,

Yeah, I went through exactly the same thing when I first got my iPod.

I leave all my music files on a 400GB LaCie Firewire drive. If you make any changes to your iTunes library like changing titles, artists, descriptions adding or deleting songs, unless you have "automatic update" turned off your iPod will be "updated" automatically when plugged in.

You should be able to turn automatic updating on or off in I think the "advanced settings" of your iTunes preferences. However, if you want to leave it set to automatic but still have the option of mounting the iPod in "manual update" mode look at this:

http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-2385.html

Apparantly, you just hold own Command+Option as the iPod is mounting and it will override the auto setting and mount the iPod without updating it. You can then do everything manually.

I think it's a good idea to keep all your ripped files on your hard drive. Definitely make sure it's a non-boot drive so any system problems won't cause you to lose your music files. The music files can also contribute to fragmentation of your start up drive, which is another reason to keep them separate.

Dean

Hi Glen, You need to turn off the iPod's auto-sync feature to do this. With your iPod plugged in, go to iTunes. On the lower right of the window you should see a small iPod-looking button. Click it to open up the iPod options panel. That's where you can turn off the auto-sync feature.

Here's why: By default, the iPod assumes that it should mirror whatever is in your iTunes Library. Say you buy a stack of CDs over the weekend. On Monday you import them all into iTunes. The next time you plug in your iPod, it would load all of those tracks. Say after listening to those tracks you realize that song 3 is the same song the tarantula ninjas sang when they beat up and torched your car, an event you do not wish to remember. Delete it from iTunes, and the next time you plug in your iPod it will be gone from there as well.

It's really a nice feature, if you have the HD space to keep your music library on your computer. Which is a good idea anyway. I've had two iPods in the last couple years, and maybe twice I've had an issue with it where the iPod needed to be restored (which deletes all of the files on the device). Having a backup saved me from reripping my entire collection, which counts in my book as a "Really Good Idea"(tm).