ipod advice wanted

[dudley]

i'm doing my computer phobic mom a favor and creating a music mix for jogging on a 4gig ipod, and as thanks she has offered to get me an ipod

ok, so i am thinking three words: storage, storage, storage (well, and quality too)

together, my gf and i probably have about 1500 or so cds, and i have a few friends who have some stuff in their collection i'd like. so round it out to maybe 1700 cds.

i know the apple ipod maxes out at 60gigs storage.
here are my questions:

1) are there any good competing brands (creative, etc) who offer 80gig equivalents?

2) if so, are they compatible with apple's itunes software, since i don't want to hassle with diff't software and possible interface issues (especially since my friends also have ipods and i will want to take parts of their ipod collection and transfer them to mine)? i don't want to get something that is incompatible w. most folks, ie having betamax when i want to copy a friend's vhs tape.

3) just how many cds (roughly 60min long) can fit onto 60gig, without having to increase the audio compression beyond the default?


4) also, i notice the 60gig ipod has video playback capability...not interested in this, since this is for music (though i do have a few enhanced cds which have video content- will these features transer to the ipod?). curious to know if apple makes a 60gig ipod w/out this capability, since i'd imagine it'd be lower in price.

about 1/4 of my cds are ones i made from hiquality cassettes which were of my 2000+ records. sadly, most of these cds are only 1 or 2 tracks long, ie the individual songs don't get a track number, since the tape just ran for 45min and is 1 long track. i'm thinking this will complicate selecting just one album cut to put on my mom's mix, and i don't want my own ipod mix to list one long 45min track which is actually 10 songs or so.

which leads to two other questions:

5) does itunes have a track numbering capability that will allow me to divide that long 45min cd track into say, 10 or so diff't itunes tracks, so that the album will be properly divided, track wise?

6) basically, i am hoping, especially for the excercise mix i am now putting together on i tunes which has me just taking a particular song off an album, that i can manually have itunes record one particular track from a long audio stream. simply put- can i control the start and stop of the itunes recording, so that if the song i want starts at 18min in and ends at 22min in, i can only record that much?

7) what speaker bays sound best? if there are some that sound really good and have the wattage to fill a room, i might just sell all my audio equipment, which would fetch a pretty penny or two.

8) i value good sound quality so i don't want to compress the audio such that i will notice a drop in quality- does itunes' default compression setting sound noticeably worse than cd quality?



many thanks for the advice

[check]

1) couldn't say
2) no, itunes is for ipods only
3) 128kbits = 56mb/60mins. Use that figure for a rough estimate at different bitrates
4) there is no "sans video" version, you must encode the video yourself and transfer it, a rip of a cd of a tape of a record is evil, itunes has no capability to split tracks into subtracks.
5) see above
6) no, itunes deals with whole tracks from CDs only. Try audacity
7) see rule 12 - and I have no opinion
8) ...test

[ilovejedd]

1) There are other players that offer bigger storage but they're more portable media player than just music players, hence, they're also big physically because they have much larger screens. Gigabeat S-series are also roughly the same size as iPods but those max out at 60GB also.

2) Only players compatible with iTunes are the iPod and the Motorola ROKR. And what you're suggesting to do is basically copyright infringement.

3) No idea what iTunes default is so I'm just assuming it's 128kbps. It's roughly 3.75MB for a 4 minute song at that bitrate so just do the math. Also, the 60GB advertised by manufacturers is not really 60GB computer-wise. Actual capacity is probably just around 56GB.

4) No, it will not transfer videos from your enhanced CD. Converting a generic video for use with your iPod is as much of a hassle as converting for the PSP. Apple doesn't sell older versions but you can probably pick up and older 60GB iPod from eBay, etc. Not sure how much those sell for though.

5) Why the heck didn't you divide the tracks when you were converting your cassettes to CD? iTunes is a music management software. There's probably an option in iTunes to create chapters/bookmarks in tracks but for dividing one long track to several short ones, you'll need an audio editing program.

6) See number 5.

7) No idea, not really an audiophile, although I do hope you're not in my neighborhood. I happen to like my peace and quiet. My dad has these Stereophile magazines and I think they recommend Bose.

8) That is personal preference. It's really up to your ears if you notice audible sound degradation. I rip to Vorbis 192kbps and they sound perfectly ok to me, but there are others who wouldn't listen to anything less than 320kbps.

[dudley]

thanks guys