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View Poll Results: Which music player(s) do you use?
Winamp 6 21.43%
Windows Media Player 8 28.57%
iTunes 15 53.57%
Foobar2000 6 21.43%
COG 1 3.57%
Realplayer 2 7.14%
Other 2 7.14%
Multiple Choice Poll. Voters: 28. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 2008.04.26, 03:58 PM   #21
Glathannus
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Originally Posted by jigenbakuda View Post
Had itunes before my ipod got stolen... I really did loathe itunes. But I loved the ipod, with its cute little pictures and such. But that gatdamn mp4 format, I hate it so. I spend hours converting my anime so it would fit on the ipod. Had half of baccano on there before it got stolen. Well I have a question is zune more "accepting" of video files, when compared to ipod? I need to by an mp3 player in the near future and I need to know if there is any reason I should not get an ipod.
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1.) MP4 can mean a lot of different things. MP4 video (also known as 'h.264') is actually very quality-versus-filesize efficient, but at the cost of more processing (a lot more processing). MP4 audio (also known as AAC) is extremely biassed compared to what the original uncompressed audio sounds like. In blind tests with Keith Jarrett piano solos from 1972, I can audibly distinguish 400kbps AAC from 478kbps WavPack, and not so much because "more bitrate is automatically better quality", but because with AAC, it is as if you are listening to a different mix, which is not as much true with MP3. Though I dismiss AAC as a junk format that should be abolished (even if you rip your own nonencrypted versions of it), I have almost nothing but praise for h.264 video. The video format has a lot of potential, but at the same time, most of the convenience utilities that are designed to convert videos so they work on your portable player - those utilities are crap. ffmpeg can do some amazing player-friendly conversions, but most people of our generation feel unmotivated to learn anything about commandline tools.

2.) If you choose Zune over iPod, you're merely trading an old set of problems, for a new set of problems. The most overrated players are manufactured by the same corporations who've already been producing computers and/or console systems, with Microsoft and Apple being no exceptions. Either the sound quality is marginalized (bigger files do not demonstrate as much perceivable improvement as they should), or the format support is very narrow, or the player doesn't offer you complete freedom to move files around without the help of an associated program (such as iTunes or Windows Media Player). You can ditch all of that bullshit, if you just buy a player from COWON instead. Their D2s are getting a little old, but they'll remain relevant for longer than anything Microsoft or Apple already has out on the market.

Speaking of Apple...

Einstein once said:
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

Keeping that in mind, let's just say Apple tries a lot of new things with their portable players, and thus there are a proportionate amount of mistakes, which you're stuck with whenever you're an early adopter of one of their revolutionary new models. The very last iPod Classic that Apple ever made, back before that term was ever established, are actually not bad players to own, if you don't mind Rockboxing them. But the newest iPod Classics have more frequent hard drive failures, and they're not so... modifiable, so all that increased storage space Apple is using as a selling point - is effectively worthless.
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Old 2008.04.26, 05:49 PM   #22
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as stated by many, iPod = iTunes, plus the interface is simple to adjust to, it displays many different languages, and that's pretty much all I care about haha.

and just for the record, I bought the Touch when it was released and I haven't had a single problem with it or iTunes yet (knock on wood).
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Old 2008.04.29, 02:44 PM   #23
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I typed a super long response yesterday, and I come here to check on it today and I find I never submitted it, or something... So I will rewrite it, with less exclamation marks this time as I am not on the same high, lol


@Glathannus
I just wet my pants after reading about cowon's d2. That is what I want, I wants me one. I went and checked wikipedia, did my internet sweeps, the regular. I am really considering buying this within the next month. My only gripe is the memory. They are currently having a promo that is giving away an 8 gb card, so the memory would be like 16 gb. I will still get it, even if I am limited to 16. Well Glathannus do you own one? I am interested in knowing how it works when I want to transfer my files from one pc to another (or to mac if your are sexy!), can I dump all the memory onto another pc? I am asking because my pc does not have a lot of memory, so even thought I might download it and up it to a d2 I would delete from my pc right after. But like with my ipod, once I deleted my stuff from the original , its stuck on there. I heard its hell getting files from an ipod on to another pc, or even your pc if you deleted the file I guess... But I will still probably buy earbuds, they are my favorite type of headphones. Also are there any known problems with it? How is the user interface, is it easier to separate my videos into different folders and such. I only had one large list of videos, I could only separate by creating a playlist. Its not like the music files that were in an ipod, I could look by album, artist, you know whatever, but videos... just one long never changing list.

Anyways, you got me to jump over to the cowon camp really quick. I can not believe I never heard of this player before. Those flac rips of all my shiina cds will sound heavenly on the d2. Once again do you have any warning before I buy the d2?
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Old 2008.04.29, 03:57 PM   #24
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I don't use portable players because my imagination is too active.

But I got one of my brothers to buy a D2, and with a 16GB memory card. They've had zero problems with it. 15 hours of battery life on FLAC -0. This variety of FLAC takes up more space than your average FLAC, but it also requires less processing, and thus... less battery, and it's still significantly smaller than WAV, and has metadata and all.

The only special things I did were made sure the memory card was a specific model from A-Data (due to success stories of people combining that model with the player), and I flashed the player with the latest Korean firmware, which made it awkward to re-enable the English (an actual option with that firmware). There's also a menu within the player, for what manner of behavior you get when you connect to a computer. The default option needs to be changed, but I can't recall (off the top of my head) to what, since I don't have the player infront of me, and it's been awhile since I set it up. I also like to set the nonEQ sound options at 1, 1, and 3 (in that order - because I can't remember which option is called what).

Buy a card reader if you don't have one already. Transfers directly on/off the the D2 are SLOOOOWW... The player's one and only major drawback, is it has a USB 1.0 interface. You may also want to get set up with foobar2000 or dBpowerAMP for moving FLACs onto the player, if your collection is already compressed in -5 or -8, so you can end up with the premium battery life, but this is not something that most D2 owners know to bother with. They can drag-&-drop their already-ripped FLAC -8s onto the player, get at least 10 hours of battery life, and that's all they need to know.

Songs moved onto the player, have no special association or exclusivity with the player or any particular software. There's no master index. There's no 'synchronization'. There's no DRM. You browse through folders, in whatever manner you already arranged them. Once you're getting into folder browsing, you'll start to appreciate Year.Month.Day prefixes on subfolder names, for multiple releases from the same artist.
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Old 2008.04.30, 03:22 PM   #25
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Sorry to be sucking the info from you, but I got some more questions...

Okay I do not have a card reader, or know its function. Which one should I get (at an affordable price) I'm only a substitute teacher, don't put me out to dry here.

Okay flac questions, I had no idea there were different settings of flacs, lol. I just said, I want flac and they popped out. But I looked on foobar, I saw how to change from 0-8. So.. which one is the best for the d2? flac-0? Mine was set to flac-5 (I guess default) I changed it to flac-8.

Do you read korean? Or should I be able to do the firmware update without knownig korean?

This is becoming a reality, I only need to put away 200 for my girl's birthday and the rest is going to the d2 fund, well except the college loan
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Old 2008.05.02, 03:31 PM   #26
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Sorry that my response wasn't sooner. My secondary job has been devouring all my spare time these past few days.

A card reader allows your computer to read & write to flash storage cards, without having to use a camera or a player as an intermediary device. You can get a dedicated SDHC card reader for roughly $10. There are more expensive card readers that include more slots for more types of flash cards, but with all the new formats that keep coming out, I'd only concern myself with the formats you're actually going to deal with at the moment.

FLAC has different compression levels. Kind of like ZIPs and RARs having "Fastest" and "Slowest" settings. FLAC -8 is the slowest and the smallest. FLAC -0 is the largest and the fastest. FLAC -5 is a general purpose compromise. My idea with the D2 is that when you're reading from flash storage, the filesize has very little impact on battery life compared to having to read large files on an HDD player. With hard drives out of the equation, processing is going to account for most of your battery drainage. Larger FLAC files (like -0) of the same content, take less processing, and thus, they drain less battery. You can still get decent battery life out of FLAC -5 or -8 though, but you're going to get the best with -0. Keeping all that in mind, I'd like to take this opportunity to rag on Apple Lossless, because it is a one-setting format (no options whatsoever) that takes up the same amount of space as FLAC -5, but requires even more processing for playback than FLAC -8.

I don't read Korean, so I had to familiarize myself with the layout of the menu, before I upgraded with the latest Korean firmware, or basically, while the stock firmware was still in-place. That way you won't have to know what any of the Korean characters mean, but you'll still know where to go to change the setting back. The Korean firmware isn't revolutionarily different - I just went with it because it was reported to have wider compatibility with the larger SDHC cards (such as the 16GB my brother bought). Different firmware versions or nationalities can actually have an impact on whether a particular flash card will work. With American firmware, sometimes the latest version is actually the least compatible...
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Old 2008.05.02, 03:34 PM   #27
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^777
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Old 2008.05.02, 09:06 PM   #28
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Originally Posted by Tokyo Jihad View Post
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700 wikipedia entries and 77 books, to be more exact!
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Old 2008.05.05, 06:02 PM   #29
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The ultimate music player accessory.

http://www.headphone.com/products/he...-micro-amp.php


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Old 2008.05.05, 06:28 PM   #30
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Dude, thatd be great for my kinda video work!

But for $400 I might as well buy a "real" one =p
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