IPOD Classic

[Chuck Wintle]

I am thinking about purchasing one of these and was wondering what you think of them? Are they worth the money or will another brand do essentially the same thing for less money? Does anyone own a C.Crane MP3 player?

[Matt Meiser]

I bought an iPod 5 or 6 years ago over anything else for the same reason I bought an iPad over anything else 2 months ago--market share and support. The accessory an in many cases manufacturer support just isn't there on the other choices. Look for cases, chargers, etc for all the other options--you'll find support is few and far between. You can buy an iPod/iPad charge cable just about anywhere.

[Chuck Wintle]

I bought an iPod 5 or 6 years ago over anything else for the same reason I bought an iPad over anything else 2 months ago--market share and support. The accessory an in many cases manufacturer support just isn't there on the other choices. Look for cases, chargers, etc for all the other options--you'll find support is few and far between. You can buy an iPod/iPad charge cable just about anywhere.
Matt,

How would you describe the sound quality from the ipod? I bought a sandisk and was not happy with it. it sounded always a little fuzzy.

[Matt Meiser]

Seems great to me if used with decent headphones.

[Derek Gilmer]

The key to music quality will be your headphones AND how you encode the music. A lot of times the default encoding is 128kb/sec mp3. That is going to lose some quality to many peoples ears. But it takes up less space on the player. You can use a losses format to preserve source quality from cds. If you are getting it off the internet it will depend on the encoding the store you are buying from uses.

[John Lohmann]

Buy good headphones like they said, my kid has a Ipod, * I own 2 Sandisk, the only difference I notice is price. cables are mini usb & they are universal

[Bruce Page]

I’ve bought a total of 5 iPods over the years, four Classics and one iTouch. The two Classic 20 gigs were for mine & the wife’s cars, (when 20 gigabytes was HUGE). Both were later replaced with Classic 80 gig & 160 gig units. I use the iTouch mainly to stream Pandora Radio to the shop or when I’m doing work around the house.

As Derek mentioned, the encoding level makes a difference. I now purchase or rip everything at 256kb/sec and can immediately spot my older music ripped at 128kb/sec.
Anyway, yeah, I’m an iPod fan. I have two Pioneer Elite 301 disc changers with very low hours sitting in the closet collecting dust...

[Mark Engel]

I have three Classics, a 30gb, an 80gb and a 160gb. The 30gb is in my truck playing through a Pioneer head unit. The 160gb is my garage playing through a Sony Home Theater receiver. The 80gb is my shop playing through a Harmon Kardon stereo receiver. My music collection is almost all encoded using 256kb or 320kb mp3 format.

I tried several other mp3 players before getting the Ipods, using the same receivers listed above. The sound quality from most mp3 players I tried was not very good at all. The best non-Ipod player I tested was a Zune. The quality from the Zune was very good. Samsung mp3 players I tried were also very good. But, with the Ipod, the quality is excellent, much closer to what you would expect to hear from the original CD.

[Jason Adkins]

My family (4 of us) currently own 6 ipods. We have owned at least 10 total, but have had several stolen and sold/gave away a few. I couldnt tell you if the ipods have better SQ or are easier to use than other brands. I can tell you that itunes is easy to use and organizes my whole music collection.

[Matt Meiser]

Yep, we actually have 4. Mine is a classic maybe 40 or 80gb? Can't remember for sure. My wife got a nano for opening a bank account a few years later and we bought my daughter a shuffle for standardization reasons. Then last year I got my wife a 160gb classic for Christmas and she gave my daughter the nano. The hot pink shuffle is now all mine and I use it when mowing since its a spare and not as expensive to replace. And now I've got the iPad which does everything the ipod does and much more.

Plus there's an app for Android phones called Doubletwist that will sync and play your iTunes library so I have that too.

[Bryan Morgan]

I am thinking about purchasing one of these and was wondering what you think of them? Are they worth the money or will another brand do essentially the same thing for less money? Does anyone own a C.Crane MP3 player?

I use my classic 80 gig every day in my car and plug it into my Line6 POD to jam along with on my guitar. My wife has the same thing in her car. My car just has the aux plug while hers actually interfaces with the head unit (her steering wheel controls and display and stuff work with it). I'd stick with the ipod if I were you... everything works with them, endless compatible accessories. I've never seen a car that worked with anything but the ipod for anything beyond the standard 1/8" jack. You don't have to load that bloated itunes junk on your computer to configure you ipod either, you can use Sharepod or Yamipod or whatever... portable apps that you can just leave on the ipod itself and run directly from there. If you are very particular about sound quality the ipod classics aren't the best... Their connections are a little noisy, whether you use the 1/8" plug or the port on the bottom. Most people don't notice it at all though... Keep your music at > 192k and you will be good to go. The Creative players have a bit better sound quality but I haven't found any 3rd party software I really like... I refuse to use the manufactures bloated out buggy programs for any of these (ipod, zen, etc) players...

[james glenn]

I highly recommend an Ipod. I have the original Nano and it is still going strong and this includes years of use on a cattle farm and construction sites. I use it everyday in the truck and a job site radio with an aux plug, and wouldn't even think about listening to the radio any more.

As other have stated, the quality really has more to do with the music file you are using than the Ipod itself. And you can get mp3 files from Youtube with a converter.

One thing I would recommend is getting the protective sleeve for the Ipod, I have the large rubber one (again original) but it does a magnificant job of protecting the unit.

[John Shuk]

There is also Google music beta. I installed it on my Mac and it made most of my music from Itunes available to play from the cloud to my Android phone and any other device I'd like to stream my music. I like Apple alot but I feel pretty restricted. It is a pain to move or share music and authorize devices.
Google music is free.

[Chuck Wintle]

well I finally broke down and bought an iPod touch 32gig. More expensive than most but it will be the first apple product I have ever owned and so I am anxious to see if it lives up to the hype. I like the fact it can download my email etc.

[Eric DeSilva]

You should have fun with it. I kind of hate iTunes as a program--very bloated and seems to always want to upgrade itself and install other bloatware--but if you are just using it to rip songs and put stuff on your iPod, it isn't that horrible of an interface. I'm a bit of an audiophile, so I don't tend to buy music off the net or the iTMS. I've ripped all my CDs, however, in Apple's lossless (ALAC) format. As far as the audio quality of the player goes, I can tell the difference between Apple's standard AAC encoding (comparable to AAC) and ALAC encoding even when listening through my car stereo. The downside is that ALAC uses up a lot more space. Yet, I can still fit about 1000 songs on about 10GB in my iPhone, which is plenty for me since I re-sync and change things a lot.

The interesting part about digitizing your music for me, at least, is using it in other ways. There are a number of systems out there--slim devices, Sonos--that allow you to access digital music libraries in your house through various widgets. In my shop, for example, I have a small device connected to a stereo that can access all my music and all my playlists on the fly. I have similar systems in the garage, the bedroom, the living room, the workout room, etc. One of those is connected to a serious audiophile rig, and the sound quality is as good as dropping a CD into the CD transport. While I still own a turntable, the overwhelming majority of my listening these days is digital.

[Matt Meiser]

Same here. Try moving the location of your music files some time. I just did that since all ours are stored on our Windows Home Server which I replaced and all our libraries point to the same set of files. Ugh!

My daughter really wants an iPod Touch and I think we are going to give in at Christmas.

[Jim Koepke]

The accessory for the iPod that makes my day is an FM transmitter that plugs into the bottom.

It works great in the car on trips as long as we are not in a major radio market with a crowded dial.

I use it in the shop all the time.

jtk

[Chuck Wintle]

You should have fun with it. I kind of hate iTunes as a program--very bloated and seems to always want to upgrade itself and install other bloatware--but if you are just using it to rip songs and put stuff on your iPod, it isn't that horrible of an interface. I'm a bit of an audiophile, so I don't tend to buy music off the net or the iTMS. I've ripped all my CDs, however, in Apple's lossless (ALAC) format. As far as the audio quality of the player goes, I can tell the difference between Apple's standard AAC encoding (comparable to AAC) and ALAC encoding even when listening through my car stereo. The downside is that ALAC uses up a lot more space. Yet, I can still fit about 1000 songs on about 10GB in my iPhone, which is plenty for me since I re-sync and change things a lot.

The interesting part about digitizing your music for me, at least, is using it in other ways. There are a number of systems out there--slim devices, Sonos--that allow you to access digital music libraries in your house through various widgets. In my shop, for example, I have a small device connected to a stereo that can access all my music and all my playlists on the fly. I have similar systems in the garage, the bedroom, the living room, the workout room, etc. One of those is connected to a serious audiophile rig, and the sound quality is as good as dropping a CD into the CD transport. While I still own a turntable, the overwhelming majority of my listening these days is digital.

there are other programs that can replace itunes such as media monkey and sharepod to name a few.

[Eric DeSilva]

Problem that I have with other systems is that most support FLAC, but not ALAC. Since I had horrible results tagging with FLAC, which seems to be non-standardized, I've decided to stick with ALAC for the time being. I gather ALAC has to be licensed from Apple, so it is not supported by most share/freeware. The other thing driving me to iTunes is that it integrates well with SqueezeCenter, which is the server software that supports the Slim Devices around my house. Some day, when iTunes bloating really tees me off, and Apple propriety formats are too constricting, I will probably have to transcode my ALAC files back to native CD format, and re-encode in something like FLAC. But I'm not ready to do undertake that yet. Especially with over 20K tracks to deal with.