My daughter (who I think must worry about my analog-retentiveness) got me a 30 GB video iPod for Christmas. This is cool, and very nice of her, but I have a question & figured it'd be easier to ask here than read the documentation!

My son also has an iPod, with iTunes installed on my wife's (i.e., mom's) laptop. Due to some OS complexities at our house :-) at the moment, only my wife's laptop can run the iTunes s/w. Is it possible to maintain two iPods on one computer, with different playlists (or whatever they're called)?

Hope this question is clear and accurate enough to engender an answer! Thanks for your attention & happy holidays!

Yes it is. When you plug your iPod into the computer, choose to update it using "manual" mode. That should do the trick, you'll be able to drag files (or playlists) to your iPod and ther other iPod owner can update their own as well.

Just bought my girlfriend an ipod shuffle for christmas and I was wondering the same thing! Well I installed the shuffle under her user and created a library and went to my user account and nothing was added to my library. I didn't change any settings and all seems calm. I know it is a new technology but it is extremely fun to use. I recommend ripping to the ipod using the lossless setting. The storage suffers but you have the exact file! Run it into an airport express with digital output to a D/A converter and you have lots of fun options for piping music! Hope you enjoy :music:

iTunes is a bit of a fraud, IMHO. Use something else.

Your iPod can hold Apple Lossless Compression (ALC) files, which allow CD quality. That's heavily advertised.

iTunes doesn't download them. That's not mentioned anywhere.

I would be thrilled to be wrong about this, but my own experience, and what I've read elsewhere, agree. If anyone knows the above to be wrong, and how to get iTunes to download in ALC, I would looooove to hear about it!

Are you talking about the iTunes Music Store, Dave? 'Cause that's kind of a different deal from the iTunes app.

ITMS sells songs in 128K AAC. The iTunes App will let you rip your music in your choice of:
• AAC
• AIFF
• MP3
• Apple Lossless
• WAV

Theo's right NT, the iTunes music store only downloads in 128K AAC format. If I had an iPod, I'd probably go with lossless just for the quality/quantity balance, but the only thing I use the music store for is to "try before I buy" the CD. I just can't bear the loss of quality with MP3's on my system.

I just received an Ipod too. Anyone give me a quick crib sheet on how to set it up for the lossless setting? (Bitrates and such confuse the heck out of me and I'd really like to transfer cd's at the highest possible setting.)

Tx.

Go to prefs/options and click on the "import" button. The higher the bitrate the better. Just think of "bitrate" as "pixels" - the more pixels the higher the resolution.

In the iTunes software app:
Preferences --> Advanced --> Importing
Import using your choice of AIFF, WAV, or Apple Lossless.
AIFF and WAV don't drop bits, so they're pretty much a direct Red Book bit transfer.
Apple Lossless does drop bits, so it should be fine to listen to, but I wouldn't burn CDs from it.
AAC supposedly is a better encoding algorithm than MP3, but only the iPod supports it, TTBOMK. MP3 is pretty much universal.
The iPod and iTunes don't support Ogg-Vorbis.
And the iPod headphones can certainly stand to be replaced, with either the Etymotic earbuds or the Grado SR-60's.

Apple Lossless does drop bits, so it should be fine to listen to, but I wouldn't burn CDs from it. How does it drop bits? I never use Apple Lossless, but the idea of lossless is that when it is decompressed it is bit for bit the same as the original wav file. If they are dropping bits, then it is not really lossless from the definition I have read. It should work like a zip file. :scratch2:

Theo, you're right that I'm talking about the music store. The initial question in this thread was about setting up iTunes, which includes the music store.

iTunes was supposed to be a chance to download music one song at a time, with quality. Apple advertises this heavily. My complaint is directed at the fact that Apple fails to disclose in its advertising that only the worst quality is available for download. Going from CD to the iPod via iTunes is fine, but then you've had to go buy the CD.

In theory, it's possible to download from other than iTunes, convert to PCM on the HD, then use the iTunes app to compress using ALC into the iPod. Thus, loading the app is fine, but signing up for the music store is not.

When I replied to this thread, I was talking about plain old itunes. I have never used the store and probably never will. It was interesting to read that lossless is not truly lossless? AIFF and Wav don't drop any bits? I'm a little confused but all of the above are better than AAC and Mp3 at whatever bit rate. I'll second the grado recommendation! (Even further when I get a headphone amp :music: ) DA DA DA

Thanks for the lossless lesson.

I've also been interested in the Grado's but their website doesn't list any retailers. (I'd really like to hear them before buying rather than just ordering them online.)

Lossless data compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. So it drops bits, but it brings them back upon encoding. Compared with AIFF and WAV, that keeps all the bits and don't require re-encoding.Apple Lossless data is stored within an MP4 container with the filename extension .m4a. It is not a variant of AAC, but instead uses linear prediction similar to other lossless codecs such as FLAC and Shorten. Apple claims that audio files compressed with its lossless codec will use up "about half the storage space" that the uncompressed data would require. Testers using a selection of music have found that compressed files are about 60% the size of the originals, similar to other lossless formats. Compared to most other formats, Apple Lossless is not as difficult to decode, making it practical for a limited-power device such as an iPod.
iTunes also supports the Apple Lossless format, which gives you CD-quality audio in about half the storage space.
If you use...Apple Lossless Encoding, you can reduce the size of CD audio tracks by about 60 to 70 percent percent without any corresponding loss in sound quality.
designed with the iTunes Music Store in mind, the Apple Lossless Codec is a compromise between the small but lossy encoding of AAC or MP3 and the large file sizes of pristine AIFF audio. Apple Lossless provides full uncompressed CD quality audio in about half the space of the original file, answering the call by discriminating musical ears for a format that offered both compression and high-quality audio.

Lossless data compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. So it drops bits, but it brings them back upon encoding. Compared with AIFF and WAV, that keeps all the bits and don't require re-encoding. I agree with the first sentence, but still disagree with the "dropping bits" statement.
Apple Lossless does drop bits, so it should be fine to listen to, but I wouldn't burn CDs from it. It compresses the bits, it does not "drop" them. Usually, "drop" in this context means they are gone forever. You also said that you would not burn CDs from the format. However, the article you quoted says "Apple Lossless provides full uncompressed CD quality audio in about half the space of the original file". When I zip up a document, I am not dropping information, I am just compressing it. The lossless formats should work the same way. Nothing you quoted says anything about dropping bits.

Sometimes I wish I had more Time!!!!!! Thanks Theo :scratch2:

I am of the opinion that Red Book (16-bit, 44.1 KHz sample rate) CD audio is barely adequate. So, for me, any compression, even lossless compression, of Red Book audio is unacceptable for critical listening (which is why the McIntosh MS300 isn't for me, as it uses FLAC by default). I use uncompressed AIFF audio in iTunes.

I am now completely confused.

I thought any compression scheme acts by taking the PCM code and combining/removing bits to yield a compressed datastream. That's called compression, or encoding. Then, on playback, an algorithm is used to "uncompress".

In a lossless scheme what you get back is bit-for bit identical to the original PCM code, meaning that nothing whatsoever is lost. You get the exact same PCM code you started with. This applies to FLAC and ALC, and some others.

In a "lossy" scheme, you don't get all the bits back. Instead, you lose selected bits, which represent high treble, deep bass and imaging info. So, lossy schemes (like MP3) sound ok on cheap headphones (because the midrange is there), but not as good as the CD they were made from.

An MS-300 recording PCM code from a CD first compresses using FLAC. On playback, the FLAC algorithm uncompresses losslessly, and you have the exact same PCM code you started with, with the added benefit that it's emanating in a constant stream from an HD, instead of a more jittery stream from a spinning disk.

The DACs in an MS-300 aren't Mc's best, but if you use the coax digital output into an MDA-1000 (yeah, I just got one!) you should get as good a sound as is possible with a coax connection, just the same as if you were using an MCD-1000 with coax.

For completeness, the MCD-1000 can also use an AES-EBU connection, which is supposed to yield even better results, but that's got nothing to do with the compression scheme.

Theo, I know you're a pro in this area. What am I missing?

Hey Theodoric, just be careful quoting the Wikipedia. It turns out it isnt the "encyclopedia" I was led to believe it was: Wikipedia Joker Eats Humble Pie (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4520678.stm)

In a lossless scheme what you get back is bit-for bit identical to the original PCM code, meaning that nothing whatsoever is lost. You get the exact same PCM code you started with. This applies to FLAC and ALC, and some others. This is the same thing that I have read. Bit for bit identical. So, for me, any compression, even lossless compression, of Red Book audio is unacceptable for critical listening (which is why the McIntosh MS300 isn't for me, as it uses FLAC by default). I use uncompressed AIFF audio in iTunes. There should be no difference between the sound of FLAC and AIFF unless the decoder in your McIntosh is messed up. Once again, when the two formats are played back they should be bit for bit identical.

I posted the following info elsewhere when this subject came up in the past.
From McIntosh's downloadable guide:

Notable features of FLAC
• Lossless: The encoding of audio (PCM) data incurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical to what went into the encoder. Each frame contains a 16-bit CRC of the frame data for detecting transmission errors.
The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.
• Fast: FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only
integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardware.
• Hardware support: Because of FLAC's free reference implementation and low
decoding complexity, FLAC is currently the only lossless codec that has any kind of hardware support.
• Streamable: Each FLAC frame contains enough data to decode that frame. FLAC does not even rely on previous or following frames. FLAC uses sync codes and CRCs (similar to MPEG and other formats), which, along with framing, allow decoders to pick up in the middle of a stream with a minimum of delay.
• Seekable: FLAC supports fast sample-accurate seeking. Not only is this useful for playback, it makes FLAC files suitable for use in editing applications.
• Flexible metadata: New metadata blocks can be defined and implemented in
future versions of FLAC without breaking older streams or decoders
• Suitable for archiving: FLAC is an open format, and there is no generation loss if you need to convert your data to another format in the future. In addition to the frame CRCs and MD5 signature, flac has a verify option that decodes the encoded stream in parallel with the encoding process and compares the result to the original, aborting with an error if there is a mismatch.• Convenient CD archiving: FLAC has a "cue sheet" metadata block for storing a CD table of contents and all track and index points. For instance, you can rip a CD to a single file, then import the CD's extracted cue sheet while encoding to MS300 Advanced Users Guide yield a single file representation of the entire CD. If your original CD is damaged,the cue sheet can be exported later in order to burn an exact copy.
• Error resistant: Because of FLAC's framing, stream errors limit the damage to the frame in which the error occurred, typically a small fraction of a second worth of data. Contrast this with some other lossless codecs, in which a single error destroys the remainder of the stream.
What FLAC is not
• Lossy. FLAC is intended for lossless compression only, as there are many good lossy formats already, such as Vorbis, MPC, and MP3 (see LAME for an
excellent open-source implementation).
• SDMI compliant, et cetera. There is no intention to support any methods of copy protection, which are, for all practical purposes, a complete waste of bits. (Another way to look at it is that since copy protection is futile, it really carries no information, so you might say FLAC already losslessly compresses all possible copy protection information down to zero bits!) Of course, we can't stop what some misguided person does with proprietary metadata blocks, but then again,non-proprietary decoders will skip them anyway.

http://www.mcintoshlabs.com/data/ma...users.guide.pdf
__________________

Who knew it would get this deep? I just got into all this compressed stuff a couple of months ago. Before it was CD and DAT that I truly dealt with(although I have a stack of vinyl waiting for me to get off my ass and buy a turntable!). Either way I know I wasn't happy with AAC or MP3. The Mcintosh piece is in a whole different league from what I need for music on the go (even if you can rip from it and I don't know if you can!). I enjoy my ipod on many different levels but never as much as my home Mcintosh stack! I consider everything a trade off until I have more money than sense! Cheers...

I just got a 30gb ipod for Christmas myself,and I imported about 50 cds,and downloaded them onto my ipod,then I tried to update,after I had taken the old songs off my puter to make room,and all I have now are the new songs.the other 50 cds are gone now!Help!
Jimmy

If I understand you right your CD's are not gone, just your time into importing them! Did you clear the ipod or your library on itunes?

I'm not a software guy. I'm a hardware guy. So I'm certainly no pro in this area.

My deal is that 16/44.1 Red Book audio is barely adequate. So why try to compress that? Even if it is a lossless compression scheme. Disk space is cheap, so why bother? Ten years ago a terabyte of rotating media took up 5000 cubic feet, and cost millions of dollars. Now I can fit two TB in a 1U rack space for less than two grand.

As far as a 30 gig iPod goes, that will take approximately 58 hours of uncompressed Red Book audio. I don't think I would have much problem taking a few minutes every couple of weeks of listening to swap out my music for new music.

As far as my "drop bits" comment, perhaps that wasn't the best way to phrase that. So let's say this: In ALAC, bits go away when moved to storage, and are reconstructed later. In AIFF and WAV formats, no bits go away ever, unless there's some sort of glitch in the I/O bus or in the storage media. I stand by all my previous comments.

And I know the pros and cons of the Wikipedia. Did you see the recent comparison between the Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica on a random sample of articles? The Wikipedia had 28 inaccuracies; the Britannica had 27 inaccuracies.

In AIFF and WAV formats, no bits go away ever, unless there's some sort of glitch in the I/O bus or in the storage media. My point is that it is irrelevant that the bits are compressed. The file is bit for bit identical when it is decoded. If I send out a zip file with a word document and open it in Dos without unzipping it it is a mess. However, when it is unzipped it is exactly the same file. Now I can fit two TB in a 1U rack space for less than two grand. The point is that it is cheaper to compress it to half the wav file size. If I can spend 2 grand on two terrabytes, then I could save a grand if I go with FLAC (which is roughly half the size of a wav file) by fitting the same music on one terrabyte.

One other issue for ipod users is that the battery will drain much faster with wav than Apple lossless (at least from the comparisons I have read).

One thing to keep in mind is that you will be stuck with Apple as your only mp3 player down the road if you do go with Apple lossless. Wav files can be played by most "mp3 players" and software programs, Apple lossless cannot. You can transcode back to wav from any of the lossless formats, but that can take time even if you use a batch program.