True, but tdn said ‘play back as intended’, I think Mikahw and others are suggesting that this isn’t possible with many of the current standards/services due to compression rates, gaps, whatever. Depends how bothered you are about those things, but it’s important to note that you might not be getting the same as what you’d get with the CD. And ‘not the same’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘worse’.
And there’s a further issue with ‘as intended’ depending how many different things you want to play it on, how restricted your copy of the music might be. That’s wandering off topic a bit.
For the moment. Copy protection, DMCA, and the polar bears may make that difficult, illegal and dangerous in the future.
I’d search, but iTunes is locked up while it updates stuff. Did I mentioned that I think it sucks ?
The deal with CDs and ripping things is that you have, more or less, complete control over how you store the songs and what you play them on. To be fair, you might still not be able to get your perfect gapless playback without picking up the right equipment and software.
Oooo, iTunes is back. Tons of hits for Brahms, but I’d think there’s a good chance you could pick up free performances of classical stuff if you knew where to look.
Assuming gaps are what’s keeping you from listening to it as intended, unfortunately it’s a bit complicated. If you have the CD:
The easiest way which should work with just about any player: Rip all the tracks as one file. I’m sure other programs will do this as well, but the only program that I know how to do it in is iTunes. When you put the CD in your computer, select the tracks you want to join, then select Advanced | join tracks, then rip the CD.
The downside to that is you can’t select any track you want if you just want to listen to one, and you either have to listen to all your CDs to find out which ones are gapless, or just rip them all as a single file and forget about listening to single songs.
Either get another player (I know) or load Rockbox on the player you already have. I hear the Rio Karma supports gapless playback out of the box.
As for Rockbox, The players that I know support gapless with Rockbox iRiver: H100, H110, H115, H120, H140, H320, H340 and iPod 4G (greyscale), Color/Photo, Nano, iPod with video (5G), and iPod Mini 1G and 2G.
I know for a fact that Rockbox plays the following formats gaplessly, but there may be others: Ogg Vorbis FLAC (of course, FLAC files are pretty big and probably not a good idea for a portable player with a small hard drive and battery) MP3s encoded with the LAME encoder (Note: iTunes doesn’t encode with LAME. About a year ago, the LAME gapless support was a little flakey, but I just checked and it seems to work fine now)
AAC support doesn’t seem to be good right now. If you’re using an iPod (or one of the supported iRiver players that’ll download from Napster), you can’t use those downloaded files while you’re running Rockbox. You can reboot to the default firmware at any time which would probably play those files.
When the Apple trademark was in dispute, there was good reason for the Beatles not to legitimize iTunes use of “Apple” in a music store. Now that they’ve lost their suit against Apple Computers, is there any reason for them to hold out further?
This time they won the trademark dispute. I think the Beatles don’t wish to legitimize anything to do with Apple Computers, it would limit them in any further disputes. There are other music stores and using one of them they would not be seen to be legitimizing Apple’s forays into the music business.
I said the modeal was dying, not that it was dead. The Internet is killing the traditional music store slowly but surely. There isn’t even a music store within 20 miles of my house that I’m aware of, and there used to be 2 in the local mall alone.
Sortof-kindof-maybe but we are not there yet. The issue is one of quality vs. convinenece. We will need far faster connections to surplant CD’s, but it will come.
I’ve really gotten tired of this meme. There are many places to get music legally that work just fine in iTunes and load just fine on the iPod. I’ve been doing so for three years.
And as long as we’re killing rumors, yes, you can use an iPod without iTunes.
Sheesh. You’d think CNN would do just the tiniest bit of research before making blanket proclamations that are out-and-out wrong.
I think the point tdn is trying to make is that Abbey Road has two instances of three tracks making up a suite that plays as one song: Mean Mr. Mustard/Polythene Pam/She Came In Through The Bathroom Window and Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End. I have both of these on my iPod and the only thing to do is blend them into one track. I can’t listen to, say, Carry That Weight on it’s own, but who would want to? I’ve noticed that mp3s, even ones ripped off a CD still contain gaps, so I rip them as AIF’s, edit out the gaps with SoundEdit (I’m on a Mac), join tracks if I have to, and then convert the AIFs to mp3. You can put AIFs onto an iPod if you want, but they are ten times the size of mp3s.
How paranoid can you get? Are cops going to start checking iPods and demanding iTunes Music Store receipts?
Oh I can get pretty fucking paranoid, but I wasn’t being 100% serious there.
I don’t think people are ever going to seize your iPod and demand proof of ownership. But if the RIAA and others had their way (and it was technically possible) they’d prevent you from ripping music off CDs without it being digitally tagged. Then they’d insist that players didn’t play untagged music. Then you’d be stuffed. I don’t, for a second, think they’d actually get away with that and it’d be broken inside a day, but that’s what the big media companies want to do.
According to the user manual for the free software cdparanoia, you can rip an arbitrary span of music into a single file. You don’t have to pay for the program either, except with your time (getting it installed and talking to your hardware can be a non-trivial task).
Why don’t you join them before ripping them as MP3s? There’s no gaps when you do that.
And there are ways to listen to individual tracks in “joined” tracks. It’s possible to add chapters to AAC files. I have a bunch of DJ mix CDs and I use a Mac program called ChapterToolMe to add chapters. Then you can jump to individual tracks via a popup menu in iTunes. It’s a pain in the ass, but doable.