MP3 player
Posted by rkj
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you can add or remove songs from any mp3 player. that is the beauty of them compared to a burnt cd.
what program do you use, if any, to listen to music on your computer? also, how much music do you have? 
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i can imagine. I am a music collector myself, so I buy a lot of CDs. They take up a lot of room, but i can't imagine having all those albums on vinyl instead!
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Well, we did get more exercise moving all those boxes of records in and out of college dorm rooms. They were heavy!  __________ Dave '91 325iX |
Weight aside; there is no substitute for the sounds that come from vinyl 
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If by that you mean the snaps, crackles, pops, and skips, I say hallelujah for that! 
You're not the first person I've heard claim that records have superior sound to digital. And with all due respect, I'm forced to respond the same way I've responded to all the other __________ Dave '91 325iX |
This wacko nut job isn't saying that vinyl is superior...only that there is a depth and a warmth in the analog recordings that gets completely filtered out in digital sound tracks. Loud and sharp noise isn't always that great to listen too
Snaps, crackles, pops and skips are just wabi and add to the experience
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As I'm learning in my Coding & Information Theory course I'm taking right now, any lossy compression technique (of which MP3 is one) will cause information to be lost, and once lost, it can never be restored. The point of MP3s, as we've discussed before, is whether the amount of loss is acceptable. Would I want to sit down in my living room and listen to a heavily compressed MP3 version of Abbey Road when I have the CD (or vinyl) right there? No, but if I'm in my car and want to have the whole Beatles library with me, it's a lot easier to have an iPod than a bunch of CDs. And the environment in which I'm listening isn't conducive to a quality auditory experience, so for that situation, the loss is acceptable. Cab 
1990 325i(s) 2004 325XiT |
Same goes with an I-Pod or portable MP3 player with those ear buds...apart from the amplifier, how much sound can reliably be pumped through those things? Once we remove a decent pair of speakers and a competent amplifier, a lot of the good stuff is gone anyway 
Might as well make up for it with volume Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/24/2009 07:13AM by Archeo-peteriX. |
Recent studies have shown that the average teen using one of these devices for an average of two hours per day has significant hearing loss especially in the higher frequencies
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Right. In my day, all we had to do was go to one Who concert to get the same effect. __________ Dave '91 325iX |
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ipod earbud headphones are garbage. it amazes me at how many people don't buy another pair of headphones to use with their ipod.
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So I guess itunes is that same crappy cramped mp3 format then, that's too bad, its so handy.
I get some CDs from the library and then burn them here through itunes; so the cd is in mp3 format, yes? Yeah Daniel, those ear buds are handy but I could never understand all these people who claim to be all about their music not having a decent pair of headphones. Those dam buds don't stay in my ears nohow  anyway.
Thanks everybody for the help, really
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itunes is evil?, Whys that Dave? What is a better piece of software that I can use? please 
So the cds I burn in itunes are not mp3 files? Thank You |
Until very recently, the music that you download from iTunes was "protected" with Digital Rights Management (DRM) that restricts playing it to the computer that you downloaded it onto, or an iPod. You could not play iTunes on, for example, a Sansa, or any other MP3 player -- just an iPod. Furthermore, iTunes was simply an interusive piece of software on my computer, and until I got rid of it it was constantly trying to assert itself as the only media player on my computer, and subjecting me to obnoxious ads for the iTunes Store. It's the Microsoft of music software. Personally, I use Media Monkey on my Windows computer. There are lots of other choices that might be a little better, but I've been happy with Media Monkey. It organizes my music library, downloads my podcast subscriptions, and syncs to my iPod with no muss and no fuss. If you mean putting a blank CD into your computer and creating an audio CD by burning MP3 files from your computer onto the blank, then technically, no they are not MP3s once they are on the CD, but the audio quality will be no better than the MP3 you started with (i.e., not as good as a commercial CD). If you mean sticking a commercial CD into your computer and ripping the tracks from the CD onto your computer, then what you start with is not an MP3, but what you end up with on your computer IS an MP3. Hope that's not too confusing. __________ Dave '91 325iX |
If you mean sticking a commercial CD into your computer and ripping the tracks from the CD onto your computer, then what you start with is not an MP3, but what you end up with on your computer IS an MP3. Hope that's not too confusing.[/quote] Sort of, I'm inserting a normal cd in and putting it on itunes (not downloading it from itunes, I do not do that, if I want music I buy a cd or rent it from the library) and then burning it there to another blank cd-mp3 format? |
Agreed and also I haven't found a turntable that doesn't skip when going over bumps! 
I have a 'travel' listening rig that consists of Beyerdynamic headphones driven by two monophonic headphone amps that I have modified. The source is a CD player and I carry some 20 CDs (mostly classical and jazz). I use this system when I am 'camped' in the Sahara or in Iran on one of my training projects. Some have asked why I don't just get an Ipod and get more than 20 hrs (or the equivalent of 2000 songs) of music. The reason is that classical and jazz music played back from a compressed source over my high resolution system is, frankly, unlistenable. And paying 250$ for the capacity to store the equivalent of 20 CDs in a lossless format seems ridiculous to me, even if it saves bulk and weight. Good listening. Bob P. |
Not that they haven't tried: It seemed like a good idea at the time.  __________ Dave '91 325iX |
Hey, if larry endorsed it, it has to be good turn on the bubble machine boys
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Hey Dave, will media monkey work like itunes; with radio stations and all the neat things you can do with it? Thanks for all the info, hanging here is going to school, so cool
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if you do end up looking into buying an mp3 player to store lossless tracks, you probably want to steer clear of the ipod (except for the ipod touch). the sound quality of other mp3 players is significantly better than the normal ipod.
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The music files on a CD you bought at the store are not MP3 format. When you use iTunes or another program to take files from a CD on to your computer (commonly called "ripping" songs), the files you end up with will be in whatever format you choose. You can heavily compress them to allow you to fit more of them on your computer/iPod/whatever, but that will result in the most loss of the original file. You can specify that the files be converted in a "lossless" format, in which case you do not lose any of the original file, but it will take up just as much space on your computer as it takes on the CD. You trade off sound quality for storage capacity. So if you have essentially unlimited data storage and just want your music on your computer, you can rip the CDs into lossless files, and then you will essentially be making an exact copy of the complete original file, but storing a few hundred CDs worth of music will consume a lot of disk space. Compressing them allows more music in the same disk space, but the files have some loss. I'd recommend ripping a few songs at different rates, from lossless on down, then listening to them through whatever medium you will be using, and see if the music sounds acceptable to you. If you're just going to listen with the computer's speakers or cheap, low quality headphones, having compressed files may not matter to you. Now, once the songs are on the computer, what you do with them is up to you. You can turn around and burn them back onto a blank CD, but as I mentioned above, once information is lost, it cannot be recovered. So if you ripped the CD onto the computer using a compression like MP3, when you put that same file onto another CD, you will not get the original file back, it can only be as good as the MP3. If you have a CD player in your car that can play MP3 CDs, this might be okay. You can put a lot more MP3 files on one CD than normal music files. So if you want to have a few physical CDs in your car but have lots of CDs' worth of music, you can do it this way. Basically, the old rule still applies; there is no free lunch. Importing files onto a player or computer with no loss will take up a lot of memory, and limit the amount of songs you can have. Importing files with compression so you can fit more songs will cause a loss of quality that can never be recovered. Whether or not the loss of quality is acceptable is up to you. I have something like 350 CDs' worth of music on my iPod (more on my laptop), and the quality doesn't bother me, because of how I use the device. But I'm not giving up my CD collection, because I don't want to lose the original songs. Cab
1990 325i(s) 2004 325XiT |
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