What about the Apple Lossless? Is that gapless too? I like the looks of the Classic rather than the Touch. I like the simplicity. I don't need / want games or video. I just want to be able to listen to my music in the highest quality without gaps between tracks.
Can I convert the discs on my iMac and drag / drop them onto the iPod without needing iTunes?
How many discs can you put on a 120 gig iPod Classic in the lossless format before it is full?
Thanks.
A FLAC compresses 16bit files to between 50 and 60% of the original file size. One hour of uncompressed music in 16bit is about 600MB. So, if you figure about 300mb per hour, that's roughly 400 hours of FLACs on a 120gig classic.
I think the classic is the way to go. I own two of them. Their advantage is the disc size and long battery life between charges (20+ hours of playtime). Their disadvantage is that they have a disc inside of them and they're said to be prone to failure where the chip based storage units with no moving parts are said to be more reliable. That said, I've owned three classics now over the course of 4 or 5 years, I used mine daily for a minimum of an hour and I've never had a disc failure.
If I can read between the lines on your Original Post (OP), it sounds to me like you haven't been involved with this subject in maybe 5 years or more. The reason I say this is that gapless playback really hasn't been an issue for a good number of years now and FLAC has been a standard now for at least that long.
The only reason I'm pointing this out is to say that you might be basing your current goals on the state-of-the-art from 5 years ago. File compression technology has really improved over that time. If you haven't listened, you should at least give a listen to the higher quality AAC compression algorithms before concluding the file compression isn't for you. (AAC is the Apple version of MP3.) At a minimum, don't judge compression by the MP3's you listened to 4 or 5 years ago, because the technology has improved sound quality alot.
The reason I point this out is that, since you say that your purpose for this is for listening at work in non-audiophile environment, the AAC format might work for you and give you 10 times more capacity on your ipod classic. I have nearly my entire music library on my bigger classic and I
literally can't live without it.
Anyway getting back to your questions, I've never had an issue with gapless playback on my ipods, so that shouldn't be a concern whatsoever.
You mention issues with how itunes sorts your music. That's also a non-issue because, in itunes, you can segregate and sort your music whatever way you define. There are something like 40 or 50 different fields that you can define for each file, if you want to. I personally keep my music segregated by artist and album and that's how I have itunes sorts. If I wanted to, I could set up my sorts by song title, genre, song length, number of times I've played it, year the song was released, or just about anything you can imagine because 40 or 50 fields is ALOT of data for each song.
So, the above is my itunes, but I also have my ipod menu setup the same way as my itunes menu...by artist and album. When I'. m in the root menu of my ipod, I select 'music'. The next menu allows me to pick what I listen to either by artist, album, song title, or cover flow (that's a semi cool app that lets you toggle through the cover art of each album to select the album that way.)
For the shows I've recorded, I enter the date and location as the album title. For each track, I define the tracking information, such as the song title and the track number. If you want, for a longer show that would span multiple CDs if you were to burn them onto CDR, you can also define the disc number (1 of 3, 2 of 3, etc). This keeps each of the songs in the right order in itunes.
If I want to listen to a show I've recorded, I select that artist and album and it plays back seamlessly.
When I load my recorded music into my itunes library, I load it in as a 16bit uncompressed .wav file. If I wanted to, I could load these onto my ipod and listen to them directly (uncompressed). I could also load and listen to my 24bit files if I preferred.
However, I find the AAC format to sound great for my listening environment. All of my listening is either at work, or in the car on the way to work. Therefore, I convert all of my .wav files to AAC format. To do this, I go into itunes and select the .wav files that I've loaded into my itunes library. Once those files are highlighted, you go into the tools menu of itunes and select 'convert to AAC'. Itunes does the conversion and then you delete the wav files from the itunes library. Synch the AAC files into your ipod and you're done!
All of my shows sound great to me and the playback is completely gapless.
I keep all of my master recordings archived on harddrives. I have 5 or 6 1TB drives that are redundant. I expect my harddrives to fail, but I keep them redundant so that when one does fail, I have a backup. When failure happens, I don't lose any data but I go right out and buy a replacement to make sure I stay redundant. My redundant drives are in my office desk drawer...one set is at home and the other is at work. If the house get hit by a tornado, my data is safe.
I gave up on CDR and DVD storage 2 years ago or so because I was having a high incidence of disc failures less than 2 years after archiving (something like between 1 and 2 failed reads for every 30 discs or so.) Since 1TB drives cost something $80 or $90 the cost against optical discs is cheaper too. I don't really worry about buying the best harddrives, because I just assume failure will happen. That keeps me diligent about keeping backups current. If I paid $300 for the best drive on the market, I'd get complacent, and from what I'm told those drives aren't necessarily any less prone to failure anyway...maybe they last longer but they will fail someday.
I hope this helps give you a little more detailed info.
Topic: confused about portables (Read 6738 times)