veeman

iTrader: (3)

^^okay, just did, and I think I answered my own question before. Thanks for the advice...laziness is a bad thing.

SQ Civic

iTrader: (3)

I did not realize that apple had such a thing. I am not into apple products, and the fact that they have created a codec that will not play on any other player is a big factor for me. from the searching I did, it seemed that the files were encoded at 800-950Kbps, and now if it truly is lossless like they say, I would be very surprised if you could tell the difference between a 256k AAC, or Mp3 track. to me the size the ALE codec takes isn't worth it, not when at 256k AAC track sounds just as good.

I have read complaints saying that the decompression of the tracks, may may your Ipod skip, die to the fact that decomprssion is very cpu intensive, this may be a bug in the software, or a slow cpu in the ipod, I have seen and read arguments for both sides.

Mark

[ July 31, 2005, 04:40 PM: Message edited by: SQ Civic ]

zarx

I have come to shed some light on this matter. AAC wasn't developed by apple - they simply chose to use it as their format of choice because it is the most promising format available. Compare 128 kbps AAC to MP3 or WMA, and you will see that the best sound is with the AAC.
All three of these formats ditch music content for file space. Lossy compression uses the human ears tendency to focus on louder music content to dial back the quality of the quieter content without much noticeable change. Among other tricks, this is basically what is done in any lossy format.
A lossless format doesn't "re-represent" the audio signal - it doesn't modify the data, it only changes the way the data is stored. Bottom line it behaves exactly like a .AIFF file, only smaller than the normal 10 MB / min (typically half the size).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless

Now - why is this causing iPods to fail? The ipod has a buffer which works analogous to RAM in a computer. When you play a song it loads it into this RAM, and then reads the music from there. The Ipod will actually load any upcoming songs in the buffer as well and then stop spinning the drive to conserve battery power. However, because apple lossless makes files which are about 25 megs a song, it has to refill this buffer a lot more frequently, which means more hard drive accessing. Larger file sizes also means more fragmentation on the drive so the read head moves a lot more as well. Bottom line - battery life falls and the iPod wears out sooner.

bluetroll

the ipod buffer is around 10MB.

Chizzy

is there any place where you can find high quality music online? (190+ only)

JRace

Yes, lots in fact.

Look into Bittorrent.