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I'd get a 30GB or 80GB iPod... (long)

Posted by Russell (A) on November 30, 2006 at 22:57:03

In Reply to: Portable Audio Device for Classical Music posted by Thornhill on November 30, 2006 at 16:23:48:

My video iPod has served me well for about a year now, though admittedly I don't use it very often. You don't have to use its video capabilities, of course, but either the 30GB ($249) or 80GB ($349) should do very nicely. And if you encode music using the Apple Lossless format or even uncompressed AIFF, you will have sound quality at original CD quality (and certainly better than what you've been getting with your MD player). Everything on my 30GB iPod is in Apple Lossless format and sounds fabulous, especially when using good headphones or when hooked up to my stereo system. To give you an idea of how much music it can hold, just let me say that this little marvel of a device contains the entire 'Ring' cycle as well as 4 other complete operas, all the symphonies of Mahler and Shostakovich, and numerous other full-length works. And there's still plenty of room for more.

Getting your CDs into your iPod is a 2-step process: encode them into iTunes and then transfer them to the iPod. It's very simple, though time-consuming, of course. For uniformity's sake, I've found I have to re-enter a lot of the printed info (composer name, name of work, track names, etc.) in iTunes before transferring the music to my iPod--do this and I guarantee it will save you confusion and headaches later on!

When I first got my iPod a year ago, gapless playback was not supported as it is now. I got around that by joining tracks that were meant to be played continuously, which is simple to do when you transfer CDs into iTunes. Thus, the 'Rheingold' in my iPod, for example, consists of 2 very long tracks, which correspond to the 2 original CDs. This might pose a problem if you want to skip around when listening, but it's easy to 'scrub' while listening on the iPod if you want to find a particular passage in a hurry. Now that my iPod has gapless playback (thanks to a recent Apple firmware update), I think I'd still want to combine CD tracks this way, since it makes for a much cleaner and simpler interface when locating something you want to hear. (I can't imagine seeing every single track from multiple operas listed alphabetically in the iPod's 'song' list.)

I've heard things have improved with regard to battery life, but I have to say that it's not that impressive with my particular iPod. They say it has to do with the size of the files (lossless files are relatively large compared to highly compressed AAC and MP3 files) and the hard drive spinning more to read the data. I've never found battery life to be a problem, though.

Good luck,
Russell

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