iPod Virgin Question ????

Leiva

Hi,
I am a ipod virgin as up until now i have been purely devoted CD Man but have been given over 40gb of music by a friend on a external hardrive and my question is this ..please help ....

I am looking for this best way of playing this music , was thinking of purchasing a 80gb ipod classic , uploading the music onto it (advice on how to to this please ) and purchasing a BOSE speaker system with ipod cradle but I have been told to be careful buying this BOSE as there are alot of imitations floating around on some well know auction sites .

If you have any input / advice to the above no matter how small please post it.

Ta

L.

hshortt

iPods use iTunes for the transfer of songs to the device. There are a small number of alternatives. It might be more appropriate to identify the format of the tunes on the disk first though, because if they are WMAs, or FLAC or some other format other than WAV or AAC they will not playback on the iPod without first transcoding them to one of the supported formats.

There is a range of players available however and you are not limited to the iPod. Personally, I use a Microsoft Zune2 and find it excellent.

Cheerio

Leiva

Ta , H.

How would i convert these music files to the type able to play on a ipod ?? is there freeware available to do this .

I know when I playback the music it uses MS MEDIA Player of Realplayer for other types .

What are my options , should I look at a different player ?

I told you i was green !

L

hshortt

Being green is part of the fun. There are converters even within iTunes or Media player to change from one format to another. The general issue with this is that an audio file is compressed to lossy format to make it smaller. i.e. the process of turning a track into a small portable file such as MP3, or WMA, or AAC involves removing parts of the information to make it smaller. This is called compression. There is one very important element of this process known as the sampling rate. This is the amount of times that that the information wave is sampled to reproduce the file. A small sampling rate will give you a very small file with poor quality. A higher rate gives a larger file with better quality. This is known as the bit rate. If you are using Windows you can see the bit rate on your files by right-clicking them and choosing properties, then look in the details tab.

People will decided for themselves what sounds best to them. I use 192Kpbs for my own encoding as to me this is what sounds best. If you get a track from iTunes it's 128kpbs. There is a difference in the methods used to encode, so some tracks at 128kpbs AAC might sound similiar to 160Kpbs MP3. It depends on the encoder.

That brings me to your question of using a converter. Yes you can convert using freeware utilities such as SUPER (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html) but when you do this you are re-compressing the file which results in another loss in quality. This is like the old days of recording a cassette tape, then recording that copy, and so on, the more you do it, the worse it gets.

For this very reason I stick to MP3 because it's supported by all players - iTunes, Media Player, Real Player etc. And all portable devices - Archos, iPod, Zune, Zen, Cowen etc.

Looking at the properties of the file you can see what format they are in, MP3, AAC, RM etc. This will help you to decide on a player.

Cheerio

Leiva

H , what can I say ...your a bright star in the Portable Media cosmos ..thanks alot for all the great info and help , you should charge .


I am gonna see what the majority of the music is saved as and let that decide what device i purchase .

I will let you know.

Ta again and again and again .

L.

hshortt