iPod - how do you typically use it?

[John McClung]

Bob, Tiger is far better than Panther anyway, so the system upgrade will be worth it in the end.

For Marc Friedland and others who "don't get it"---that's how I was until a received an iPod as a gift abot 7 years ago. Didn't even open the box for months.

But finally I broke down, learned how to use it, and I think it's one of the most amazing and productive devices I've ever owned.

My main uses:

enjoying many podcasts

creating playlists of band sets to practice with

having all material I need for teach steel classes in the palm of my hand

oh yeah, and occasionally listening to music!

I recommend ripping CDs at 192KB/sec in AAC format, much cleaner than MP3, though it is larger in file size. But I could hear distortion of standard 128KB MP3's very early on.

Seriously, on the commute to work and back, I'm mainly learning a lot from Macintosh-oriented podcasts; or listening to the wonderful interviews of NPR's Terri Gross on her show Fresh Air, HIGHLY recommended. And there are tons of great podcasts about music, recording, comedy, foreign languages, you name it...and they're so easy to subscribe to at iTunes online, and they're FREE!

I'm about to get the 160GB iPod, currently have the 30GB iPod video, but it's always chock full.

There's one aggravation about dumping CD's to iPods: when you do that, iTunes automatically goes to GraceNote online to see if the track titles and other info are online. If they are, like magic all that metadata comes in. But if the info isn't available, then you have to manually enter all that, a huge pain.

For you independent producers, it's easy, free and a real service to your listeners to upload the ID stuff to GraceNote.

[Marc Friedland]

John,
I can understand some of the advantages you mentioned about iPods, and I’m glad they work that well for you.
For me, the reality is slightly different than it might be for others.
I’ve never listened to talk radio, or any type of podcast, and as a general rule don’t find that sort of thing educational, entertaining or fun, and if it doesn’t fall into at least one of those categories, I don’t have time for it. (Yes, I know I’m sort of weird) Some might think I’m missing out on a whole lot of neat stuff in the world by my decisions, and I can appreciate that, but at this point will probably never change.
In addition to what I find on my car’s radio, I rarely listen to anything other than:
1. Songs I need to learn for band performances;
2. My collection of personal recordings;
3. CDs to listen to on a long car trip.

1. For learning new band songs, I am usually given a CD with the songs on them, or sometimes they are sent as mp3s on email, and then I make a copy to listen to. Once I’ve learned the song, which actually takes only a little time, I seldom listen to the original recording again.

2. My personal stuff consists of recordings from original and cover bands either Lorilee or I’ve been in over the past 40 plus years. I would say there are about 1500 songs in this collection.
I can pretty much guarantee the info on any of these won’t automatically appear, or if it does it would probably be wrong, which means either way I would have to do the “huge pain” portion of inputting it all manually.
I already have all of this material on CDs separated the way I want, in the order I want, with contents, labels and pictures to go with many of them.

3. For long car trips I may grab up to a dozen CDs to have on hand in case the area’s local radio isn’t happening. Some of these CDs are ones I created with 15 to 20 hand-picked songs on them. The others will range from ZZ Top to the Bee Gees. I do like country a lot, but I only bring country CDs once in a while because I pretty much get my fill of country by playing gigs, and practicing pedal steel along to music at home.

I can see how useful iPods can be for most people.
I realize that you can’t tell how something tastes until you taste it, but based on my examples above, and other reasons I can think of as well, I still think I fall into the category of people who would not get many worthwhile benefits from them. I still miss album covers with pictures, and liner notes you can actually read, but I guess that’s a different topic altogether.

Marc

[b0b]

I'm finding the two-step process tedious. Are there any devices that will let you import a CD directly into the iPod, without going through the computer step first?

[John McClung]

There may be, Bob, but think of it this way: iTunes on the computer is your master library of everything; the iPod is a portable subset of that.

I have it set to automatically download any new stuff from iTunes to my 30GB iPod, but with tons of music and podcasts, my iPod is always full and i have to keep unchecking items in iTunes to so that synced items will fit onto the iPod. Thus my need to get the 160GB iPod with our tax refund!

One can also manually manage what gets synced down to the iPod.

[John McClung]

Marc, I'm with you on the line notes and credits, I still buy a lot of CD's then rip to iTunes, then sync to iPod, because I want to read the lyrics and check the credits, and enjoy the art. But on CD's where I don't care all that much, more and more I download from iTunes.

Some albums on iTunes actually come with a digital booklet version of the album graphics, which is great, but only a few have that, I wish that were always available.

I do buy a lot of single songs that I need to learn for gigs, iTunes is extremely handy for that. I've even done that right in a lesson, the student will fail to bring the source material, so we just hop on the Mac, download the song, and we're right back in business for 99 cents.