ipod nano or ipod classic,advice please

[SeanMacGabhann]

true but the original masters would have been done at different times and possibly studios - but almost certainly with different guidelines. if it was the other way around I would have been surprised, but the chronology is about right

[*Bob*]

Interesting article, Barry.. ta for that.

It's something of an 'evil art', is mastering.. involving boxes of tricks which seem to have only one knob on the front but cost ?20,000. It is amazing though - what they can squeeze out of a so-so recording (I speak from experience ha ha). It's just case of knowing when to stop: not always easy with the grubby record company exec standing behind the engineer shouting "Louder! Louder! More!"

[Asset]

I used to work at Porky's Mastering on Shaftesbury Avenue. It was a very in-demand mastering studio amongst certain music genres and artists would request specific engineers to do the mastering; it's not just the machinery it is the engineer's ears as well.

[RosieH]

back to the original question - my point of view would be classic all the way - unless you can be arsed to update your library regularly. I bought a nano thinking 1000 songs would be plenty - as it turns out, it really isn't. I'm bored and too busy to update, so get a big one and put all the songs you like on there, rather than having to whittle

[SeanMacGabhann]

have to agree RosieH - the whole point about being able to carry around more than a couple of cd's is that you don't have to decide which mood/groove you are in - get the whole lot on there I say - kills a weekend does that

aaaanyway - let's have a quick look at Bren-cam

"..... didn't know..... I could use MP3s on the iPod............... *sob* so I now have most of my CD collection on my hard drive in * oh God* MP3 as well as in the......... apple format. *wail*"

[Brendan]

And I'm still finding iTunes anoying. *blubber*

You know what it is. I used to be down with all the geeky shit man. Hell I used develop and support bespoke software. I have now been out of it for 5 years and I feel like I have completely lost touch. I feel a bit like someone?s nan trying to use the computer for the first time. Or one of those guys who still insisted on using windows 3.1 well into this century.

[Shu.Kurimu.Sensei]

I completely agree that there are plenty of other music library programs, many of which have a lot of features that are better than iTunes.

But if you don't want to spend much time sorting your files out, love tinkering with playlists for parties, dj sets etc and mood sets for when you are out and about, I reckon iTunes is king.

Granted you do have to spend a bit of time researching how best to set it up, or messing with it yourself until you get it to do things the way you want.. Linda.com actually have a couple of tutorial cds on just this :))

And the id3 tagging system leaves a lot to be desired, especially for unicode file names, so other software is often needed for this.

When you do get used to it, using iTunes really does save a lot of time and hassle.

Just don't ever buy anything from their music store! By either buying and ripping your cds at whatever bit-rate you desire, or downloading them from whatever source you like, your music library is then free to transfer to whatever device you go with in the future. Buying music files from any of the online music stores is quite frankly a waste of money. And do not forget that even so called "drm free" files still contain meta data from your account, so emailing an album to a mate who then shares it online say could cause you hassle later down the line.

For most people, the combination of Exact Audio Copy (commonly referred to as EAC) and the LAME encoding plug in is enough to get a high quality mp3 rip at 320k. Of course if you want lossless, there are plenty of programs to rip into high quality formats, most notably FLAC, APE, OGG etc. If your CD is very rare, you may want to consider ripping it to a Bin and Cue file then ripping that to your format of choice and archiving the disc.

When you have your library just the way you like, back the thing up on *quality* dvds, never ever trust magnetic storage for anything, only a fool would do that :))

[LostThePlot]

Shu.Kurimu.Sensei Wrote:

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> > When you have your library just the way you like,

> back the thing up on *quality* dvds, never ever

> trust magnetic storage for anything, only a fool

> would do that :))

Well, I can recover hard drives, but i've never yet recovered a dodgy DVD....

RAID two 2TB servers and you'll have no dramas..... ;-)

[zephyr]

My boys both have ipod nanos and use itunes but I won't touch it. Why would I need to.

My music player is my Sony Ericsson w880i with its ear bud noise excluding earphones. It has a 4gb card in it.

I can drag and drop tunes onto it using a miniUSB card reader if I take the card out or drag and drop onto the phone when its plugged into the PC.

Many do not like Media Player but I use its library which is fine and use it to rip CDs. My systen is automatically backed up weekly to an external hard drive.

I do not buy music online as it is a pain in the backside.

itunes has far too many compatability issues with PCs and laptops

My phones music player has never crashed and had to be 'restored'

Whats more I get a free upgrade of my music player every 12-18 months.

Get a decent walkman phone and not an overpriced stand alone player (I admit that they do look cool)

[Shu.Kurimu.Sensei]

Hmm, thing is if people used decent media (Taiyo Yuden Grade 1 dye), defragged regularly, and used a CRC checker then stored their discs properly there would be no dodgy DVDs to recover :))

The problem with RAID is the cost of hard discs @ 1TB at the moment, and of course, even RAID can fail - I've had that happen with a RAID setup from Lacie, of course all the stuff on there had been backed up already :)) hard discs are only ever a temporary storage choice :)

[spadetownboy]

took the plunge and got a black 8gb nano,pretty impressed with my first venture in to apple. have to ay i dont know what all the fuss is about itunes i,ve found it fairly painless so far.