I Pod with headphones

[Thom]

  I was not aware that ipods had problems of this sort.  You say you can not replace the battery?? what happens when the battery completely dies?  From what I have seen the casing is sealed.  Are we expected to throw them away and pay £100s of pounds (thats what ipods sell for in London) every 2 years??

  marvin

Marvin, that may well be the ultimate thing, buying a new one every now and then. Bunny's advice to buy a do it your self battery renewal kit may be tempting but as you say, the casing is sealed and i don't think that i am capable of doing the thing myself. That's how it is.

[orbital]

i have a question, not very iPod-related, but does anyone do this?

Do any of you ever buy CDs from Amazon, then save them onto your iPod (and maybe save a backup file of course on your computer) and then resell the CD? If you get a used CD, you could probably resell it for the same price. Though reselling isn't always a quick process.... but in the end, all you'll have to pay for is shipping, which means you get a great discount! And you could scan the booklet as a pdf, too, so you still have that.

It's just an idea I had, not sure how it'd work.

You can hardly ever sell it at the same price. Once you open the packaging, depreciation starts right away. I think it is all too much trouble. Better to download from music stores, cheaper than the shipping and you'll avoid all the complications

[PSmith08]

You can hardly ever sell it at the same price. Once you open the packaging, depreciation starts right away. I think it is all too much trouble. Better to download from music stores, cheaper than the shipping and you'll avoid all the complications

Especially now that iTMS and EMI are offering the DRM-free 256 kbps downloads. You can get a lot of shiny music from the EMI archives.

[Bunny]

Especially now that iTMS and EMI are offering the DRM-free 256 kbps downloads. You can get a lot of shiny music from the EMI archives.

256kbps Mp3 doesn't sound very good over a decent speaker system.  256 kbps mp4 does sound better which is why satellite radio uses that format for streaming audio, but it's still not true cd quality, let alone SACD or DVD-A quality.  One company, Linn Records does sell drm free uncompressed music files, and that's where the industry will be heading in the future when broadband is even faster than it is today.  At that point, I'll give up buying cds and start buying music online.  Until then, I'll keep getting cds.  Btw, you still have to make hard copies of the music you buy (either on cds or dvds) if you want to be safe.  Hard drives and ipods fail eventually.  None of them were made to be used for 15 or 20 years.  The cds I bought 20 years ago still work which is not something I can say about my first ipod.

[PSmith08]

256kbps Mp3 doesn't sound very good over a decent speaker system. 256 kbps mp4 does sound better which is why satellite radio uses that format for streaming audio, but it's still not true cd quality, let alone SACD or DVD-A quality.  One company, Linn Records does sell drm free uncompressed music files, and that's where the industry will be heading in the future when broadband is even faster than it is today.  At that point, I'll give up buying cds and start buying music online.  Until then, I'll keep getting cds.  Btw, you still have to make hard copies of the music you buy (either on cds or dvds) if you want to be safe.  Hard drives and ipods fail eventually.  None of them were made to be used for 15 or 20 years.  The cds I bought 20 years ago still work which is not something I can say about my first ipod.

I'll grant most or all of that, and say only this - for casual or portable listening - DRM-free 256 kbps AAC is a start.

For my purposes, 128 kbps AAC does pretty good, and if I think I'm missing something, I get out the CD rig. I tend to buy online only when I simply must hear something, but don't have the time or energy to track down a CD. Also, iTunes occasionally has a neat OOP or rare find. Otherwise, it's CDs ripped on to the Mac all the way with the CDs handy for "serious" listening.

[M forever]

I just changed jobs and in my new job, I have to travel a lot, so I put together a travel package for high quality sound on the road.

I take a notebook anyway, because that's very important in my job, but since storage capacity is not that big (80GB) and I need the space for other stuff, I also take an external 300GB hard drive, my Sennheiser HD580, and this wonderful little invention, the Total BitHead:



What that is is basically a small, but high quality USB preamplifier. Kind of like an external sound card. So you bypass all the crappy, weak and noisy analog output stages. The sound goes from your hard drive directly via USB to the BitHead which converts it to clear and well balanced analog out, strong enough to drive any headphone at higher levels than you need. But it has a volume control, of course.

It is about the size of a pack of cigarettes. I velcroed it to the top of the hard drive, and hooking both up to the notebook takes seconds. You don't even have to install drivers. The BitHead has the drivers stored inside and configures itself as the output device within a moment.

Yes, the total package takes up more room than an iPod or similar solution, but it provides me with tons of storage space and high quality sound everywhere.

I generally use flac, 320kbps or other compression formats only for older recordings or those with not so complex soundscapes. I can still hear some artifacts in complex orchestral music at 320. They aren't very strong, but they are still there, in some places.