The latter. I use in-ear headphones that not only prevent the tish-tish-tish-tish noise leaking out to annoy my fellow commuters, but also provide 20db of sound isolation to block out all those tossers who think I prefer to hear their music over my own. Annoying fuckers have made themselves prematurely deaf, so they need to turn the volume up EVEN LOUDER. :mad:
Do the in-the-ear headphones stay in? I’ve had trouble with ones I’ve used with my portable CD player…they simply don’t fit in my ear and fall out. Are the iPod earbuds different somehow, or am I going to have to get some bajillion dollar custom jobs?
(I’m also considering making the leap)
Isn’t this like asking whether a DVD player can play DVDs?
They don’t stay in my ears. (I’m glad someone else has this problem. I thought perhaps I had deformed ear canals.)
We might just in be the Deformed Ear Canal Society, methinks.
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Yes.
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iTunes will play most anything I think (save for maybe WMV). The iPod will only play MP4s. The good news is all you have to do is right-click (or optn-click) on the file in iTunes and choose “convert for iPod” and away it goes. The converter is built into iTunes.
Beware ITunes. This software is really invasive and problematic. Simply playing a soundfile that somebody emails to you automatically plays in ITunes, rather than Winamp or whatever music you used to use. Then it’s automatically added to your IPod. Apple simply assumes that it’s the center of the universe when it comes to music on your PC, and acts accordingly.
Songs you buy from Apple will play in Itunes but not anywhere else. Because Apple has so much of the marketplace, they got greedy and are not being compatible with the rest of the world. In addition to being annoying this is always a mistake (Remember Beta?).
ITunes only seems to sync the music on the PC with the music on the Ipod. They probably do this to prevent filesharing, but this really hobbles the usability of the IPod.
I’ve been using Palm OS devices for a while, and they have it right. Sync means anything on the device not on the machine goes over to the machine, while at the same time anything on the machine not on the device goes on the device. It should always be a two way street, not one way.
I think there might be a way to change settings to make the Ipod work as an external drive, as it should, but it’s definitely not the default. There are also other software programs available for the IPod besides ITunes, but I don’t know anything about them.
I’d save some money and buy an MP3 player that’s not from Apple. There’s plenty of good ones out there.
Almost any software you install on your computer takes over the opening duties of whatever file it can. This is a Windows setting, and can be changed.
Songs you buy with DRM are usually device specific. For example, Windows PlaysForSure won’t play on Macs or iPods at all. That’s how DRM works. Apple’s DRM works within iTunes and the iPod.
Exactly… 1 copy of iTunes is “tied” with your iPod, so if you connect that iPod to another computer, it’ll try to sync that library to your iPod. How else should it work? Just load the iPod up with everything on both computers? Yeah, this is for piracy, but also people like me who would go totally insane if that iPod synced like that. Then how would you delete a song? You’d have to delete it twice. Or 3 times if you’re synching between computers.
This is just a setting in preferences. It’s easy to make the iPod act as a disk.
I thought we already established that the iPod was pretty competitively priced, and cheaper in a lot of cases?
If your iTunes does that, its because you told it to when you installed it. It’s a preference and you get the chance to turn it on or off when you install, and can change it anytime once installed. Some people want this. Just because you don’t is no reason to get pissy. Turn it off.
So don’t buy them. There’s no rule that you have to buy your music from the iTunes music store to play on your iPod. Import your own CDs in MP3 if that’s all you want to do. Or, if you absolutely must buy from Apple but can’t bear to have an AAC instead of an MP3, just burn it and import it back in as an MP3.
It’s absolutely to prevent file sharing. I don’t understand personally why you’d *need *to copy music off your iPod if you weren’t up to something illegal, but if you *had *to there are ways it can be done. Jeebus, I saw a software package in Best Buy that does this if you have to restore from a HD crash and you don’t have backups (again, that would be the user’s fault. Apple is responsible for your backup strategy now too?).
You didn’t even *read *the screens during install & set up did you? It’s right there in the install part, and again, that can be turned off and on at the click of a button.
Personally, I want my iPod for music & movies since I have a thumb drive for my files. You may want files on your iPod. Both options are available. Different folks, different strokes and all that. You’re pissy because the *default *option isn’t the one *you *want? Oh, the horror! Not everybody wants what Debaser wants! Ring an alarm… or something.
So it’s sort of like the old Realplayer? (which, BTW, isn’t like that anymore as long as you deselect it from being the default player while installing it).
I’m guessing that the non-iPod players are more friendly in this respect. I can load files onto my Zen Micro using the Creative software that came with the player, the Yahoo Music service, the Rhapsody service, or WMP 10.
I’ve never quite understood this. I have a 6 GB mp3 player, and about 90 GB of music on my computer. I’ve never tried using the automatic Sync function simply because it didn’t make sense. I’m guessing that it would start loading the files in whatever order they were filed under in my music folders until the player was full. I’l have to try it next time I want to change out all my music and see what happens. I’m guessing it wil be alphabetical so I’ll have everything from Abba (don’t laugh, it was free) to Billy Bragg. Weezer will never make it.
Ok, go ahead and laugh. I deserve it.
Only if you set the option for it to do this automatically, you can pretty easily change this so it only adds to your I-Pod what you tell it to, and only when you direct it to.
Yep, when you first hook up your ipod with itunes on, it asks you to automatically sync the ipod or manually sync it. If you manually do it, it will only copy over tracks that you choose to copy.
Not true. AAC is a standard, and while iTunes certainly is the main application that uses it, it is gaining more support every day on non-iPod music players. There are quite a few cell phones out there that will play AAC, the Sony PSP and upcoming Microsoft Zune will play AAC, etc. AAC is not an Apple format, they have just popularized it. Wikipedia has a good article on AAC, and they include an (incomplete) list of devices that will play AAC.
Since you’ve already paid for the songs, I assume it is perfectly legal to make a different format file to listen to them on a different player (Home Recording Act, I think).
The free program Audacity can convert any audio output directly to a .wav format, and then to DRM-free .mp3 format.
I used this to convert a bunch of old (public domain, but annoyingly DRM-ed) Real Audio format radio programs (Orson Welles shows, The Shadow, Falsh Gordon, etc) to .mp3 format so I could listen to them on my iPod. I also had some Musicmatch files that I also could convert.
You’re correct, but you can also set iTunes to only synchronise selected playlists if you only want specific subsets copied to the iPod.
So I’m going to download this wacky iTunes thing tonight and point it at my music files. Anyone know if that has any chance of screwing up my MM set up?
Well, iTunes works best if you let it organise your files (which basically means it will copy them all into it’s own directory and organise them by Artist-Album-Song), however, there is a preference you can change so as it just uses your current file structure and doesn’t copy your files to its own directory.
If you’re the kind of person who likes manually arranging your music files in your own unique way, iTunes might not be for you - before the iPod was even thought about, iTunes was not only an MP3 playing app, but an MP3 organisation app, and works best when you use it as your main music management tool, forgoing organising files in the Finder or Explorer.
OB
I never said it was -but thanks for updating me on more and more players starting to recognize the AAC standard. That’s certainly great news!
I haven’t done anything wonky with my file arrangements. I let the default rule. I just wanted to make certain that if I had both on my system at once it wouldn’t wig out on me.
Is it worth it to upgrade to the newer iPod if you don’t plan to use the video function? The battery just died in my 4G ipod, and it’s a little less than two years old. Do the newer generations provide increased battery power, or any other features other than the video capability and a color screen?