Listening habits on iPod

[jon abbey]

yeah, again, I'm not trying to find a universal truth, just something that works for me. I'm personally not comfortable with Apple Lossless, so I don't use it.

[dolzenko]

lossless is lossless.

p e r i o d

[Salty Swift]

As a fringe benefit of Father's Day, I got a nice iPod Touch and so far all I've done is read a couple of papers, program several contacts, check the weather, and listen to a few albums.

What other features of this gadget should I be utilizing

[Vincent Kargatis]

What other features of this gadget should I be utilizing

Smart playlists, which could, depending on your listening habits or desires, range from mildly useful to transformative.

[snailed]

Not to be argumentative, but at least by very definition Earl is wrong here and Joe / other ALAC defenders are right. The problems are likely in his playback system for any differences he hears as previously mentioned. Absolute respect to him as he does incredible work on your releases, Jon, but the misinformation does seem to be from his end, and if it isn't, Apple (should) have a fine little lawsuit on its hands. While he is most likely a fine mastering engineer with extremely sensitive ears, I would be curious to his response for Kevin's little experiment:

Quoted from the To mp3 or not to mp3 thread for posterity:

When Waves and later Apple and Flac came up with lossless codecs i tested it. Run a checksum, compress, decompress, and rerun the md5 and you will see they are the same. The lossless files can reconstitute the original file exactly.

-kp

Sometimes the md5 might not work cause even though the data is the same, the fileheader might be different..

2 strategoies for that:

1. old skool. (use what we know about phase)

take the original file. copy it. invert the phase. now take the reconstituted file and put that in your daw... and sum the mix, or just play it.

If the file is EXACT sample for sample, we now have 2 identical files that are perfectly revese in phase and a mix of that should yield perfect silence since every sample that has a positive value now is combined with a negitive of the same value. (+5 + -5 = 0)... the bounce should be all zeros.

2. Save the original sample values as text... do the same with the 2nd file.. and do a %diff on them... should get nothing....

booya~

Not trying to convert you to ALAC or anything, Jon, as ripping all those CDs into AIFFs seems fine if you have enough space (about half my lossless albums sit uncompressed in the same format). But something to think about, he might not be right on this one issue. If he is, though, I'm open to it (and pissed at apple!) - I'd just be curious if Kevin's experiment is concurrent with his findings. It is my guess that it will expose that all the data is actually there.

[jon abbey]

yeah, can't say I'm interested in pursuing this one anymore, sorry. I feel comfortable with my current position, and I know Earl does too. if you want to think he and I are wrong, that's fine with both him and me.

[snailed]

Oh yeah, cool, I don't blame you- this has been discussed to death here and so many other places, so it doesn't really matter much. Only reason I brought it up again was in light of Kevin's post, which I found rather interesting. This sort of discussion leaves out the important stuff - the actual music, and focusing too much on side issues like this is like missing the forest for the trees.

Fwiw, not really my intention to prove you or Earl wrong either - I was just curious for my own reasons if I had wasted all that time converting things to ALAC and was duped by Apple. I should have prefaced my statement with, "at least according to Apple's official position..." And lord knows, they are certainly not infallible.

Just as a sidenote, IMO a good CD player still sounds better than an ipod even in lossless aiff. Especially with a digital output to good speakers (how is it again that ipods still don't have a digital out of some kind?!). Ipods also get shitty amplification without some sort of headphone amp, and the output can be a little noisy as well.

[Salty Swift]

What other features of this gadget should I be utilizing

Smart playlists, which could, depending on your listening habits or desires, range from mildly useful to transformative.

Pardon my ignorance on the topic Vincent, but what exactly are smart playlists and how do I set them up on the iPod Touch?