With the Man releasing virtual B-sides & everyting else that has been downloadable, have starting thinking about getting an IPOD to have all his songs on, chronologically. Has any1 done this? Any suggestions or opinions from people about IPODs in general?

Thanks.

The whole iPod thing is the biggest case of the emperor's new clothes that I've ever seen.

It's all a conspiracy to stop people sharing music!

Once you transfer music digitally to the player, you can't then hook it up to a friend's PC or Mac and transfer it digitally onto their computer.

I use a Philips 3" CD MP3 player. I like it because it's retro, low-tech and anti-Apple whom are just Microsoft in Sheep's clothing, if you ask me.

BinaryJustin said:

Yes you can!

BinaryJustin said:

Have u actually used an iPod and tried to do what YOU say it doesnt?? Or are u just another one who believes EVERYTHING YOU read?? You can share music from your iPod to another iPod, as long as you dock it to the other person's puter and take into iTunes. Dont be so critical of new media, you sound like one of the old communists from the 1980's!!!! Grow with the times.

I'm suspicious of any proprietary system.

Besides, 3" CDs are cute.

I use an iPod to host my Prince collection and I can tell you it's the bomb being able to just have every Prince track u own on all the time throughout the day while you're doing stuff. It's meant I've discovered loads of new songs. Not to mention the ability to compile playlists while I'm lying in bed of my fav prince songs and not havin to get up to change the CD.
It's really conveniant and great especially for long journeys.

BinaryJustin said:

Actually, it's the other way around. Bill Gates stole Apple's operating system and created Windows from it, sold his computers at a cheaper price, and now the public is forced to use PC's. It's safer to say that Microsoft is really Apple in sheep's clothing.

MAC all the way, until my dying day!

LovesexyIsThe1 said:

I use Windows, but I'd kill to have one of each. Mac's are just so aesthetically pleasing

LovesexyIsThe1 said:

Personal computers would never have taken off without the invention of the mouse by Douglas Engelbart in 1968. So you could say Microsoft and Apple are Englebart in sheep's clothing...

Everybody took something from someone else, depends how far you wanna go back...

I've been thinking of getting an Ipod, however there's a few things I've heard here and there that kinda put me off -

1. it's not solid state memory, it's basically a spinning hard-drive, and as such can skip.
2. battery time is only 8 hours before it needs a recharge
3. batteries only have an expected life span of a year and a half
4. battery replacement units cost approx £150

Anyone care to comment?

metalorange said:

The brand new "Clickwheel™" iPod has a battery life of 12 hours.

Spookymuffin said:

Just curious...if you have the 20 mb ipod (that's the biggest storage capacity they make, right?) and you load every single Prince cd, every single with remixes and b-sides, all of the NPGMC stuff, and a handfull of boots...

...how much space do you have left in that memory for something else by someone else?

I'm hot to trot to get one of these things, and I've thought about the idea of putting ALL of my Prince stuff on there, but then I'd want room for other stuff, too...

What's that like?

Keith/Kacey

The biggest iPod offered right now is 40 gig. To give you an idea of how many songs it can hold...I have 4600 songs in my iTunes library encoded as 160kbps AAC files (128 would be sufficient but I like the extra quality). This takes up just over 21 gigs. So you could fit about 8000 songs on the biggest iPod, more if you encode at 128kbps.

I have 383 Prince songs in my library. Most of his studio records. A couple boots. I can't imagine anyone having so many Prince songs that they wouldn't be able to fit other stuff on the iPod. I am holding out for a 60 gig model though. They should be coming out in the near future.

just curious...

How long does it actually take to rip-n-transfer 1cd to iPod, at 128kb?
Is the sound quality good enough?

Anybody who is willing to pay that much money for an MP3 player deserves it.

SONY walkman all the way! It's been with me since goddamn 1988. Eats batteries like a nuclear plant, but is so aesthetically pleasing I wouldn't change it for anything. Who wouldn't just love to look at that black rectangular box for hours?

And both Apple and Microsoft for that matter can suck my...

Kacey725 said:

40GB's the biggest - it's the one I've got and my entire Prince collection (800 songs) plus all other artists I have takes up ~15-20GBs so no, you won't run out of space.

1. I suppose it COULD skip...mine hasn't ever done so, and I'm quite active with it. I've knocked it off a table (ouch) and it didn't skip. Under normal use (and slight abuse) it's very unlikely to ever skip.
2. I was REALLY concerned about battery life when I first wanted to get one, but I've had my 3rd generation iPod for over a year now and have never had the charge run out. I think the battery life is more than sufficient for the vast majority of users and, now that the new ones have even better power management, 12 hours will get you around quite a bit.
3. I have friends with 1st (almost 3 years old) and 2nd (just about two years old) generation iPods that are still going strong. Mine's just over a year old now and has had no decline in performance.
4. There are options for battery replacement, if needed, that are less expensive than Apple charges.

I love my iPod. It's a 30gb and It's loaded with ALL official Prince and prince-related releases as well as tons of other music and lots of audiobooks. It's getting close to full...time to get a 40gb!

An alternative to the iPod for portable music is the Rio Karma. The current model has 20GB capacity, and the cheapest I saw it online was $250. No more than the equivalent apple model at least, and I think a little cheaper in general. I got one last year, and I've been loving it. Besides supporting MP3 and WMA, it also supports the open, free-to-use formats Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. Ogg Vorbis is a high-compression format like MP3 or AAC, and the audio quality sounds great to me. For the true audiophile, you can use FLAC which gives you perfect quality at a file size about 1/2 of raw audio. This obivously means much lower song-capacity though.

It also comes with a nifty little docking station that has RCA outputs on the back, so when you dock it you can play it directly through your home stereo. Pretty cool for a house party or just casual listening.

Oh yeah, one more bonus for the Karma: It'll do gapless playback very well, even with MP3, which is a format that doesn't natively support gapless playback. From what I have read online, the iPod doesn't do gapless.

What's that mean? It means when listening to One Nite Alone, Live! on your iPod, you'll get a little pause between every track. So during the piano medley there will be a hickup between tracks, even though on the CD the songs segue from one the next smoothly. If you like listening to live albums (including bootlegs!), then you might want to look into a Karma, or some other player that supports gapless playback.

kdavis said:

1. I've personally never had my iPod skip.

2. In my experience, the battery life of these things (as in the number of hours playback before recharging) is always misleading. I've had a few things and have never found that they quite live up to the time specified, and the iPod is no exception.

3. The main problem with the iPod is the lifespan of the battery. I have a 1st generation iPod, which is about 3 years old now. By the time it was 18 months or so old, it would only play for 3 hrs or so before it needed charging, and now it's down to about 2 hrs!!!

Unless Apple have sorted this out (and I don't mean saying, "now it plays for 12 hrs!" - that's a different issue...), I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wanted a player that would last for more than a couple of years (and it's only guaranteed for 9 months or something!)

It's a real shame, because otherwise I think it's a really cool, convenient little MP3 player, that syncs-up nicely with your computer...

4. I'd love to know about these! To be honest, if I buy another music player, I'll probably get one that takes rechargable batteries which are removable (AA's or something), as that's just plain easier!!

I really want to love the iPod! If they fix the new ones up real nice, maybe I'll forgive them..... (Hell, maybe I'll even buy a new one....)

deebee said:

You do a disservice to readers if you're unwilling to check facts before posting your "problems" with the iPod.

Apple has a 1 year warranty on the iPod (for $60 you can get AppleCare and extend it to two years). As best I can tell from their site (http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/support/rio/warranty.asp), there's only a 90 DAY warranty on Rio players, so I'd say that Apple is very kind in their support for the iPod.

The declining lifespan of a rechargeable battery is not an Apple or an iPod problem - this is the nature of rechargeable batteries. ANY player - any device - with a rechargeable battery will decline over time. The only valid fault with the iPod is that the battery isn't cheap or easy to replace (actually, it's very easy to replace, just not very consumer friendly to do so!).

I'd love for the iPod to have an easy to replace battery IF it could be done without compromising the form factor.

candyperfume said:

Tx 2 my ipod i discovered piled up-somewhere-songs like; the come on maxi! (just 2 day..i never new i had it)....and other in-between-songs like Do U Lie...(i mean i dont like Kiss and i played Mountains 2 much so how i reach Do u Lie?)....or 4 instance "Splash" which was in between my npgmc 2nd rated stuff...

So Tx iPod..!!

And btw WHAT A INCREDIBLE packiging and look and feel!!!!!

kdavis said:

Ok, maybe it's 1 yr now.... am pretty sure it was 9 months when I bought mine, although a 1 yr guarantee wouldn't have helped me when mine started playing up 18 months down the line.

Yes, you can purchase additional cover, but this is over and above the basic cost of the unit. It's relatively low cost is now one of its selling points, I believe. Perhaps, if this were made clear, people would be comparing it with more expensive players (ones whose design may make for years of happy listening) when choosing which to buy...? And $60 is a significant difference..... Why here in the UK, you could use 60 USD to buy... well, I don't know... a pack of cigarettes or something... (Ooh! I'm sooo mean! Take heart - I'll be laughing on the other side of my face when British export industries collapse, and US ones are still hanging on in there...)


But that's the whole point!!! I can throw away my old crappy rechargable AA batteries for other things. I can even buy a new battery for my mobile/cell phone for £20 online, and replace it with ease. The fact that it would cost £150 to do the same for the iPod, due to its design, is, for me at least, a fairly major problem now that my battery has run down, like other rechargables.


My apologies - I had mistaken this for an informal discussion site.....! But I can assure you that my committment to public "service" has always been unwavering..... (and, btw, these things sure seemed like "problems" to me...)

[This message was edited Fri Aug 6 14:50:11 2004 by deebee]
[This message was edited Fri Aug 6 14:52:45 2004 by deebee]

BinaryJustin said:

of course, you realize, the music on the iPod is a mirror of what's on your hard disk. You can do anything at all with what you have on your hard disk (of course, there are laws you should respect). There is software to get teh music off of an iPod - but I never had a need to go that direction since my computer hard disk is my master collection.

And exactly how do you fit your whole price library on a 3" CD? And how do you have custom play lists on that CD? I have 2018 songs on my iPod. I can play them by artist, by album, by any custom playlist I set up on my computer, by any automatic playlist I set up (like 5 star prince songs). Pick my play list and either listen in order or random play. etc. etc. One you have an iPod, you will never want a CD based player.

kdavis said:

I'm sure they COULD make the Ipod run on normal AA batteries or at least some battery you can easily buy over a counter and replace yourself - but I think they don't because when it's performance declines in a few years, faced with the high price of a battery replacement most people will just buy a new generation Ipod. So it's a self replenishing market in a sneaky way.

metalorange said:

Possibly, but not likely, at least on AAs. My fiancée got a 64MB flash-memory player with her subscription to Audible.com, and it runs off two AA batteries. When listening to it relatively regularly, 2-4 hours a day, she has to replace the batteries about twice a week.

An hard-drive player like the iPod is going to suck down a lot more juice spinning the hard drive up to load music, and the music it's playing is most likely at a higher bitrate than the audio books my fiancée is listening to. So even with quality engineering, I just think it'd be very difficult to run an iPod off regular batteries and make it cost effective.

It would be nice if the companies made the built-in rechargeable batteries user-replaceable though, like they are with cell phones. The Rio Karma has the same problem -- the battery isn't accessible without tearing the case apart, and then I'm sure you've voided the warranty. Speaking of which, I paid for an extra 4 years of coverage through a third party at an online retailer for something like 50 bucks. I figured it would be worth it in case the drive went out, or maybe I'd even get them to replace the battery.

alandail said:

I can squeeze about 60 songs on one 3" CD if I encode at 32/128 VBR kbps JS. I only ever use the Lame encoder on the highest quality setting which means it takes ages to encode stuff - but it's worth it. I also use an mp3 trimming program to trim silent frames from the beginning and end of albums.

The batteries in my player are just regular rechargeable AAA batteries. Once they fail to charge up any more, I'll just chuck them and buy another couple for £1.00

When friends have shown an interest in listening to something, I just take the disc out of the player, give it them and burn another for myself.

I don't use play lists. I like listening to albums in the order they were originally sequenced.

The whole iPod kerfuffle is just another status symbol thing.

I love my 3" MP3 CD player!!!

BinaryJustin said:

Dont you still have sore feet from stopping and starting your car the same way that Fred Flintstone did it back in his day??? Get up with the times and stop being anti-progressive for once....live a little!!! But, if I'm not mistaken....arent you from England??? Enough said....hmmmmm

NPGman said:

Yes, I'm from England, you cheeky Muppet. We do have hot and cold running water, you know.

I'm not being a luddite - it's just common sense to me. If the hard drive of an iPod fucks up, that's it - you're fucked. You have to buy another one for £250.00 or so... If a 3" CD scratches, I can simply take it out, throw it and burn another.

Here, buy yourself a copy of the MP3 CD player, I use. It's only $99.98

http://www.amazon.com/exe...s&n=507846

BinaryJustin said:

No thanks.....My iPod is still rockin ALL the P music I can fit on it.....20GB and have only 850 songs on it!!!! Still ALOT more to go....just uploaded The Chocolate Invasion AND Slaughterhouse last week.....AND the only hardware, disc, I have on my belt(holder)....IS THE IPOD!!!! LOL.....you take care Mr. Flintstone and enjoy your 60 songs at a time!!! Cheerio, Cheerio, and chop, chop!!!

BinaryJustin said:

First of all, you are an uneducated idiot. Second, what's a proprietary system? Isn't Microsoft's WMA proprietary?

People like you are what gives Apple a bad name. People like you say things like:

"Macs don't have Office.", "Mac's can't do things like PC's". "You can't game on a Mac.". All these are ignorant lies.

Let's look at the facts:

1. iPods can be used on BOTH platforms, with no problems
iTunes purchased music can be used on up two 5 computers.

2. Macs don't have adware/spyware.
3. Macs don't have pop-ups.
4. Macs don't have viruses
5. Macs don't get slower over time like PC's ( this is with Windows fact that it can't delete old cache files and therefore slow down the computer.).

Know your facts before you speak. It makes you look like the moron you are.