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ipods are gapless...
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peter 2006-09-17, 05:59 #61
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In reply to post ID 2705
Quote by LycoLoco on 2006-09-14, 18:40:
So what I wanna know is what Peter's thoughts on this are.
My thoughts run along much the same lines as everyone else's here: gapless = good. It's gratifying, but also in a way ridiculous, that it's taken Apple, with their vast software engineering operation, three years to catch up with the Karma, which was developed by about six people. Its lead was bound not to last forever.

But the, uh, hypothetical post-Karma Sigmatel-based portables can still do other stuff the Ipod can't: in particular, they can take on music over mass-storage class, i.e. install-lessly on any OS. Until Ipod can do that, I don't think I'll get one -- and it probably never will, as Apple are becoming Microsoft and have let the dollar signs in their eyes at the thought of keeping users inside the Itunes "ecosystem" blind them to users' feelings of hostility to being locked-in and advertised at.

Peter
RubenNYC 2006-09-17, 06:21 #62
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Quote by peter:
My thoughts run along much the same lines as everyone else's here: gapless = good. It's gratifying, but also in a way ridiculous, that it's taken Apple, with their vast software engineering operation, three years to catch up with the Karma, which was developed by about six people. Its lead was bound not to last forever.

I nominate this as quote of the day.   :-D
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nudel 2006-09-17, 06:31 #63
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In reply to post #61
/me feels guilty for just buying two games off iTunes. :)

It is amazing it took them so long to get it right, and also that it's still the norm for it not to work on other players and older iPods (and newer ones that haven't been upgraded yet), not to mention non-portable devices like Xbox 360 and PSP (sans ATRAC and SonicStage/SonyConnect insanity, at least). But it is so nice that Apple have added fixed gapless and that people who *require* gapless in a DAP now have more choice and are forced to make fewer compromises. I hope the rest of the industry follows with gapless support.

There definitely still isn't a perfect DAP out there. Storage space vs form factor is a big deal to me. Apple seem the only company offering large disks without the player turning into a PSP-sized monster, often because the only models with large HDDs are aimed at video playback which I have very little interest in. I expect it's also because Apple can get their hands on more, smaller and cheaper components more easily than everyone else, and because they have the market share to make it worth selling large capacity players to the relatively-few who want them.

(For the record, I think the PSP is great as a games machine and the screen means it has to be large, but I don't want to carry something that size around in my pocket on a daily basis.)

The iPod still also lacks anything beyond a preset-driven equaliser, which is pretty shocking. But I used Rockbox for a while when it didn't have an EQ that worked (without skipping) on the iPod and I was fine with that, so I'll live. (My usual headphones don't need much EQ. Rockbox now has some kind of hardware EQ on the iPod but I haven't tried it.)

USB MSC would be nice, and it was great having the power of my file manager (Opus) to use for syncing/copying/searching music, instead of the clumsy and limited interfaces you get in music managers, but TBH it's not a big deal to me. I don't tend to spend much time doing that stuff (one big run when I move to new hardware, then the odd small run to add each new CD I buy) so other things are a much larger factor.

Something I miss from Rockbox, which I actually thought was a drawback at first, was the option to view contents as a filesystem instead of a tag database. (Rockbox does both now, though the tag database is quite new and may need some work. I haven't tried it though.) This was actually good, and exactly what I do on my PC. Being able to separate things as arbitrarily as I wished was great. I kept my bootleg live recordings separate from my official albums, comedy and books away from my music, and random single tracks away from everything else. You can't really do that with tags, unless you turn things into fake artists and albums, or have a much more advanced tag/menu system on the DAP.

Idea for how that could work:

---
The organisation stuff could still be tag based. (I like tags because they let you use characters that are illegal in filenames and thus don't ugly-up album names.) All it really needs is to allow the user to specify a hierarchy (i.e. tree) of "groups", and then allow them to specify which group(s) a given music file belongs to. The groups themselves could work the same way the typical "Music" or "Albums" or "Artists" groups already work (I guess you could, optionally, specify which view a group uses to avoid the pointless extra Albums/Artists/Songs menu when not desired), just filtering on an extra attribute. By default everything would go into a "Music" group so people who don't need this have no additonal complications.
---

Oh, and tag-based things almost always screw up "Various Artists". Now that the gapless beast is slain I think that's my new pet hate in the world of digital music, although it looks like iTunes/iPod have something for that which I've yet to investigate.

The wireless stuff in Zune is interesting but, since it's just for sharing music and not for syncing, I can't see myself ever actually using it. Seems like a wasted opportunity. Wifi transfer speeds are definitely fast enough for syncing the odd new album so why not allow it? (Or have I been misinformed?)

Anyway, where am I going here? Well, I think the iPod is currently the best choice for me, personally, since it has gapless, large capacity, reasonable form factor, reasonable battery life and reasonable management software (i.e. not SonicStage/SonyConnect). But if someone came along with something that was no worse in those areas and also gave me a proper equaliser and the ability to define how my files are organised then I would be tempted.

Hmm... Sorry for long/random post. Just some ideas. :)
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This post was edited 2 times, last on 2006-09-17, 06:39 by nudel.
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flattop100 2006-09-17, 20:50 #64
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Rockbox doesn't do MSC? How do you load music?
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nudel 2006-09-17, 23:18 #65
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Quote by flattop100:
Rockbox doesn't do MSC? How do you load music?

Rockbox does do MSC but I'm using the official firmware since it has better battery life and Zuma. I'm going to keep an eye on Rockbox, though; it's improving all the time. (I am a Zuma addict but to be fair to Rockbox it has lots of games, including Doom (though Doom on iPod controls is just silly if you ask me) and a jewels puzzle game, etc. I don't really care about games on the iPod but Zuma is just too cool. :))

Oh, something else I miss sometimes from the Karma: Waveform progress bar. Not only was it pretty, it was useful as well.
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Nordburgh 2006-09-18, 08:27 #66
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Quote by nudel:
Quote by flattop100:
Rockbox doesn't do MSC? How do you load music?
Oh, something else I miss sometimes from the Karma: Waveform progress bar. Not only was it pretty, it was useful as well.
I'm partial to the meters myself.
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RubenNYC 2006-09-18, 09:01 #67
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I used the meters for years. Just recently switched over to wave form, partly for a change of pace, partly 'cuz I like seeing the album title.  On the Vibez, the meters were lowered to make the album title visible.
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jaw2ek 2006-09-18, 11:59 #68
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Quote by RubenNYC:
On the Vibez, the meters were lowered to make the album title visible.

You know what?  I hadn't noticed that?
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jaw2ek 2006-09-18, 12:00 #69
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In reply to post #67
Quote by RubenNYC:
On the Vibez, the meters were lowered to make the album title visible.

You know what?  I hadn't noticed that
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LycoLoco 2006-09-18, 12:21 #70
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nilepez 2006-09-19, 08:18 #71
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In reply to post #61
Quote by peter on 2006-09-17, 05:59:
Quote by LycoLoco on 2006-09-14, 18:40:
So what I wanna know is what Peter's thoughts on this are.
My thoughts run along much the same lines as everyone else's here: gapless = good. It's gratifying, but also in a way ridiculous, that it's taken Apple, with their vast software engineering operation, three years to catch up with the Karma, which was developed by about six people. Its lead was bound not to last forever.

But was it bound to happen before they hired UKRioEngineer? ;)
RubenNYC 2006-09-19, 08:27 #72
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My guess is they were planning it and started work on it.  Hugo was probably hired to clean up the mess. :-D   Seriously, I don't know that he's been there long enough to make that kind of impact, yet.  Now, if Apple all of a sudden adds OGG support, then you know it's Hugo.
nilepez 2006-09-19, 08:37 #73
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In reply to post #63
Quote by nudel on 2006-09-17, 06:31:
Oh, and tag-based things almost always screw up "Various Artists". Now that the gapless beast is slain I think that's my new pet hate in the world of digital music, although it looks like iTunes/iPod have something for that which I've yet to investigate.

Could you describe the problem vs what you'd like it to do?  I believe what I did on VA albums was to use the actual artist for each track.

Quote by nudel on 2006-09-17, 06:31:
The wireless stuff in Zune is interesting but, since it's just for sharing music and not for syncing, I can't see myself ever actually using it. Seems like a wasted opportunity. Wifi transfer speeds are definitely fast enough for syncing the odd new album so why not allow it? (Or have I been misinformed?)

Until I read more about it's actual audio playback (gapless, EQ) and interface (aside from the physical interface) I have no opinion on the player (though I think the business model, which appears to mirror Apples, is bad for the consumer).  As for wireless, it's 1G.  MS rarely gets anything right the first few times.  That said, I'd think they could add that capability to the player via a firmware update.  Personally, I don't find it very important, because I never use the sync feature.  I always manually decide.  I guess that's because I don't want the software to decide what to remove from my player (which is always 95-100% full).

Anyway, where am I going here? Well, I think the iPod is currently the best choice for me, personally, since it has gapless, large capacity, reasonable form factor, reasonable battery life and reasonable management software (i.e. not SonicStage/SonyConnect). But if someone came along with something that was no worse in those areas and also gave me a proper equaliser and the ability to define how my files are organised then I would be tempted.

I'm still good with my Karma.  I could use another 20GB for boots, but I can live with what I have.  With 270 hours of music on the Karma, I doubt I've listened to every song on it yet, but now that I've got it set to play every artist A-Z, that will change....eventually....only 250 hours to go ;)
nilepez 2006-09-19, 09:00 #74
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Quote by RubenNYC:
My guess is they were planning it and started work on it.  Hugo was probably hired to clean up the mess. :-D   Seriously, I don't know that he's been there long enough to make that kind of impact, yet.  Now, if Apple all of a sudden adds OGG support, then you know it's Hugo.

That will never happen.  The problem with adding OGG, IMO, is that at lower bitrates (160kbs or less for sure) OGG is better.  I've looked at spectrum of sound in wavelab, and 160kbs VBR OGG files have audio up through 20khz.  An AAC of the same song only went to 16khz (or was it 15khz?).  MP3, even at 256 VBR (or was it 320) never got much over 16khz.

But ok, most people can't hear much over 16khz (I've recently discovered I may have lost stuff over 16khz myself :-( ); however, at lower bit rates it's even more profound.  I don't think they'd want to add a CoDec that sounds better at 128kbs (the standard iTunes bit rate) than AAC.  Then again, I'm not sure why they don't use Ogg, since there's nothing preventing them from wrapping it in their DRM.

But what do I know.  Is till don't understand why people buy lossy files, much less lossy files that can't play on another brand of player.  If only Circuit City had been smart enough to sell cheap CD's that only play on CD player purchased from Circuit City....there'd be no Best Buy.  ;-)
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nudel 2006-09-19, 13:59 #75
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Quote by nilepez:
Quote by nudel on 2006-09-17, 06:31:
Oh, and tag-based things almost always screw up "Various Artists". Now that the gapless beast is slain I think that's my new pet hate in the world of digital music, although it looks like iTunes/iPod have something for that which I've yet to investigate.

Could you describe the problem vs what you'd like it to do?  I believe what I did on VA albums was to use the actual artist for each track.
Well, given an album with tags like this:

Album = Moosic, Artist = Moo, Title = I Make Milk
Album = Moosic, Artist = Cow, Title = I Eat Grass

most tag-based things (including older iPods, the Karma and just about everything else I've tried that wasn't file-driven) add both Moo and Cow to their Artists menu, below which both have a Moosic album which only has their track(s) on it.

I've now tried the iTunes/iPod "Compilation" feature and they got half of it right but still screwed up the other half. :-(

On an iPod, with Compilation turned on and an album that is flagged as a Compilation, the album itself will exist in a separate "Compilations" menu along with other compilations albums.

As well as that, any artist who ONLY has tracks in Compilation albums will be removed from the Artists menu.

All very good so far! I was about to cream in my pants over the fact someone finally got this right, but then I realised:

Artists who have full albums and who also have tracks on Compilation albums have entires for the Compilation albums under their Albums menu and if you go into those albums they only show the one artist's track(s).

To me that seems like a bug rather than intended behaviour. Why would you remove compilation-only artists from a list of artists but not remove compilation albums from the remaining artists, one menu level below?

Not sure what I'm going to do... I could rename all artists on compilation albums to "V - <Artist name>" to ensure they are unique. Bit ugly but it would work. Or I could go back to the old workaround and add the artist names into the track titles and set the artist tags to "Various Artists". Which is "wrong" but gets the job done. It'd also solve the problem of the track artists not being shown when you list a compilation album's tracks.

I could also abuse the Genre field (which I religiously keep blank) by setting things as Album, Compilation, Single, Comedy, Book etc. which would also solve my other problem of wanting to keep all those things separate. The Genre menu seems to drill down into Artist, Album then Track so, apart from the extra menu level at the top, it's perfect.

Other stuff that is missing from the iPod: You can't sort albums by year. I got used to that with Rockbox (since my folders have the year in them) and now everything seems messy since it's alphabetical. Silly thing is Apple have obviously thought of this because iTunes lets you do it.

A good thing on the iPod: You can tag disc numbers and it treats multi-disk albums as one big album. No more having to renumber all the tracks on Disc 2 and pretend the album was a 160 minute CD. :-)

A bad thing: It's cool that you can add shortcuts to things like Artists and Games on the top-level menu, but the sorting is weird. It might go: Music, Photos, Videos, Artists, Albums, Extras-- i.e. Artist and Albums aren't grouped with Music, even though they're shortcuts to things below music. Extras is also a top-level menu item so it's not like it's sorting top-level and then shortcuts... Not sure how it's sorting.

Listened to a few albums today. All played completely gaplessly as far as I noticed.
Bit the shed again. Typical.
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