Will someone please explain mp3’s to me? I see the I-pod on TV. Is this only compatible with Apples? Do you take CD’s and copy your favorite songs onto this little device? Can you download music to this device? Is there one compatible with the PC?
AFAIK, I-Pod is just for Mac. MP3 is a lossy compression for audio. Basically (simplified explanation), it takes the raw audio file and cuts out the bits that you can’t hear anyway. This allows you to have a much smaller file. So you can create MP3s from your CD collection and store them on your computer.
You can then transfer these onto a portable MP3 player, which is just a small computer with a sound card. Have a look at http://www.mp3playerstore.com/ for some examples of these.
MP3 is a patented form of compression, so it isn’t absolutly free. Ogg Vorbis is an alternative that is free but isn’t supported in many (any?) portable players at the moment. It also claims to give superior sound at lower bitrates…you can listen to samples at http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/listen.html
There actually are iPods compatible with PCs now.
Personally, I’d just go with a portable CD player that can read MP3 discs. You can then burn a CD-RW with about 150 songs on it for a couple hundred bucks less than an iPod, assuming you’ve already got the CD burner and so on.
ipod is compatible with pcs as stated above.
it’s actually software you install on your pc that transfers the music.
i-pods are expensive though. basically it lets you store hundreds of mp3s on one device… but do you need that?
there are very nice mp3 players that have 128mb for a fraction of the cost…
128 MB will only allow you to store a couple od CDs worth at a reasonable compression ratio (i.e. not too compressed). That means you have to plan ahead what songs you want to listen to and have your PC handy.
A portable CD player is considerably larger and less convenient than an iPod. An iPod is a joy to use but costs. You pays your money and takes your choice.
All of what was said above is true. It’s not just for Macs any more.
I made the move to an iPod a few months ago and I love it. Yes, they are expensive, but I really like the portability.
There really is a big difference between clipping a small iPod to your waistband and clipping a big portable CD player there. I have a portable CD player, although not one that can play MP3 files, and it’s gathering dust in my desk drawer. Man, that sucka burned through the AA batteries!
The rechargable battery, for one, makes the iPod a great investment.
And my iPod is “only” 5MB (they are making 10MB and 20MB models now) – so I can (and do) use it as a storage device for my laptop computer. So I have about 2MB of songs on it (more than enough) and 3MB of my most important files backed up from the hard drive of my laptop.
An iPod is only worth buying, though, if you have the audio capabilities on your computer to “rip” songs from CDs, store them on your computer as MP3 files, and then transfer them to your iPod (or other MP3 player).
A final word of advice: Use high rates of encoding when you transfer songs from CDs to MP3s. The standard rates of 128 or 160 mps is not quite good enough for a discriminating ear. I’m an amateur musician, an so have a pretty good ear for music, so I find that rates of 160 mps or lower have too much of a treble “flutter” that IS noticible.
So, go for an encoding rate of 192 mps or higher. You’ll get fewer song on your MP3 player that way, but what’s the difference between having 700 songs or 1,000 songs at your disposal. Not much, I’d say., but who One word (or
MP3 is a way to compress audio so that it takes up less space on a digital device.
Basically, you put an audio cd into a computer, run a program to convert the songs on the CD into MP3 files onto your hard drive. You can then either play the songs back on the computer, or download them to a standalone device to play them back, like an iPod. You can also download MP3s from the internet, but I won’t get into that here.
There are a large number of standalone Mp3 players out there, all with advanatages and disadvantages. For example, something with 128 meg will only hold about 10 songs (more if you reduce the bitrate, but not much more) which might be ok for a quick jog around the block, but isn’t going to cut it on a cross-country flight. Portable CD players that can also play CD-Rs with mp3s on them are ok, since they’ll hold more songs, but they’re rather bulky, and you’d also have to carry around a bunch of cds. The iPod is expensive, but has good storage capacity in a great (tiny) size, has a very good battery life and a very easy to use UI. There are some competitors to the iPod that have similar specs.
The iPod comes in both Mac and Windows versions. If you have a windows machine, you need to have a Firewire/1394 port.
Sorry for the garbled text at the end of my latest post (the one above buckgully’s post.
I think you mean GB (gigabytes) and not MB (megabytes) in all instances above. Five MB would only be about the size of one song while 5 GB would hold hundreds of songs. A typical computer hard drive sold today is about 40 GB in size for reference.
As an alternative to all of the above the company Archos makes a device similar to the iPod called the Jukebox. The Jukebox comes in various flavors from 6 Gig to 20 Gig. It’s basically a USB hard drive that has an MP3 player built in. You load files on it by simply dragging them to it; no special software (beyond the USB drivers) needed. I’ve got about 200 songs on mine and also use it to transfer files between my home and office machines.
(BTW, I’m not connected with Archos, just a happy Jukebox user.)
What bitrate are you encoding these songs at so that only 10 fit into 128 megs? At 128kbit, which is fine for most sets of headphones, a four minute song takes up about 4 megs of memory, which means 32 songs on a 128 meg player.
Thanks for all the explanations. I’m not saying I’m an idiot, but I think I will have trouble getting one to work.
I have their 20 gig Multimedia Jukebox. Why multimedia, you ask? I’m glad you did. It’s multimedia because it has a little screen on the front, so it can play video files as well.
So now, when I go to work, not only do I have my entire music collection hanging on my belt, but I have (at the moment) about 12 hours of movies and TV shows ready and waiting to entertain me during those slow periods.
It is the single greatest invention since the wheel.