Slashdot Mirror

Apple never intended for them to be used as audio recorders, and they have no control over the quality of third party dongles.

Your analogy is flawed or, rather, you are too passive. These are not "third party dongles", these are licensed and manufactured in partnership with Apple (that provides the firmware support and allows access to the iPod's innards). You don't get Apple's blessing, you don't get very far. Look at the incredibly slow progress the iPod Linux has made relative to, say, RockBox. This is because Apple actively works to lock out unauthorised development.

The iPod's hardware seems well capable of supporting high-fidelity recording, both analog and digital. The PortalPlayer PP5002B chipset (and derivatives on current models) used in all the big iPods since the early days is capable, according to PortalPlayer itself, of encoding MP3, WAV, AIFF, WMA, and ATRAC3 at up to 320Kbit/s.

A little over a year ago iPods switched to the Wolfson WM8731L ADC/DAC ($5 each in small lots!), which can sample at 44.1kHz, 48kHz or 96kHz. I haven't kept up with current iPod offerings because they are of little interest to me but I would assume Apple has not regressed on the ADC capabilities. It's hard these days to spend more than $3 on a signal chip and *not* get high-quality ADC. I note that most of the other players based on a similar PortalPlayer/Wolfson platform (eg Samsung, Philips, iRiver) offer high-fidelity recording.

So you see you are wrong. The iPod's lack of high-fidelity sound recording is not the fault of "third party dongles", it is not a limitation of iPod hardware, it is simply that Apple has chosen to intentionally limit the available quality of the recording function. As to why Apple would choose to cripple the iPod this way, many people probably have different opinions on that. personally, I feel that it's Apple's way of making nice with the RIAA.

iPod, if nothing else is advertisement for Apple Technology.

Really? I thought it was more a brilliant advert for PortalPlayer. Apple doesn't have an exclusive contract with PP - their OS is already being used by Samsung, Philips, and others. The real winners out of this are PP - they look well placed to remain the largest mp3 player systems provider no matter whose box is currently the market leader.

There is a sourceforge project devoted to it, as well as people gathering information.

With all due respect, the iPod takes the cake as far as MP3 players go. It's small, lightweight, got a huge capacity, looks cool (yeah, stupid reason), and now, it's reasonably priced.

I've owned Rios of all flavors, Nomad I and Nomad II. My biggest complaint with any MP3 player that uses Smartmedia, CompactFlash, or any other type of flash card memory is that it's just NOT ENOUGH storage. The most I've had was 128megs in my Nomad II (and a couple years ago, 128megs cost a lot more than it does now). 128megs is just enough to hold your average cd at 192k/sec. Yes, yes, you can downsample. But at 128k/sec you maybe able to squeeze in two albums.

Whereas with the iPod, with the 5gig minimum, you have plenty of room to breathe. I don't have to worry about downsampling my collection just to fit an album or two on a Rio or Nomad.

All in all, I just don't think flash card based MP3 players are worthwhile. Personally, I found it easier to use my Sony Discman (and that's why I eventually sold my Nomad II; my last flash card based player).

I bought a 10gig a few months after it was released and when the new 20s were announced, I sold my 10 and ordered the 20.

I have an Aiwa CD/MP3 deck in my car (the first generation) and ever since I bought my iPod, I've been using that in the car via the mini-in, instead of CDs with MP3s burned on them.

I've also been using the iPod as a portable HD. A great tool for backing mail files and transporting large movie files from the office to home.

Overall, I'm a big iPod fan and I recommend them to PC and Mac users alike.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's *nix tools to use the iPod in a *nix environment. There are a couple of sites on the web by people who want to use the iPod in Linux, but it doesn't look like they're going to get it working anytime soon.

I'm strictly a PC user (Windows 9x/NT/2K/XP, Linux, FreeBSD; more FreeBSD than Linux). I own a newer iBook and have become an OS X fan. But I use my iPod in Windows using Ephpod and MacDrive. I found that iTunes just wasn't for me, especially since Ephpod will import Winamp playlists.

Good luck in your quest for an MP3 player.

someone started this, but it hasn't moved at all since the day i found it (7 months ago)

The guys started hacking away at the db and looked like they were beginning to do a good job.

Here is the site

Yes.

http://neuron.com/~jason/ipod.html

rOD.

Since my post is apparently +2 interesting and +1 funny (even if a bit -1 overrated) I might as well elaborate.

Said coworker is a programmer-geek type, not a sysadmin-geek type. He hates all things Microsoft with the appropriate level of passion, and has been using Linux for a while, with mixed happiness -- very impressed with the power and flexibility, totally happy with the *nix environment, but a little underwhelmed by the lack of polish on the graphics and multimedia end of things. (No flames please -- these aren't my opinions; I'm just conveying.) He'd been eyeing OS X for a while in a casual sort of way, but not with much seriousness.

When he got the iPod-gift, I suggested that hey, we might be able to play with some stuff to try to get it working on his Linux box -- there's others out there working on it. Hmmm, he said.

But then he came in the next day with his new Powerbook. :)

RTFA: running an iPod on Linux http://www.neuron.com/jason/ipod.html

Namely EphPod in conjunction with either MacDrive or MacOpener. The links can be found in this comment I posted for another iPod story, but it applies more to this one.

EphPod has really come a long way in a short period of time. The listserv runs pretty strong and there is a growing group of people helping this 1 developer find bugs and suggest improvements.
There's also a guy trying to get it to work on Linux... help him out.

I have had my iPod working great since February, and it has never touched a Mac.

BTW: There's also a Windows firmware updater. Check the link to my other /. post for the URL. He got it to work with v1.1 within a day or two of its release.. pretty sweet.

• iPoding.com
• iPodlounge.com

This is not accurate. Runnning Debian/PPC with kernel 2.4.13-ben0 on my G4 Powerbook, the sbp2 driver is able to identify the iPod as a Firewire disk. Make sure you've got the CONFIG_MAC_PARTITION kenel option enabled -- the iPod uses the MacOS partitioning scheme.

See iPod on Linux or ipodhacks.com

ieee1394: NodeMgr: hotplug policy returned 0xfffffffe
ieee1394: Device added: node 0:1023, GUID 0000000002002f0d
ieee1394: sbp2: Driver forced to serialize I/O (serialize_io = 1)
ieee1394: sbp2: Node 0:1023: Max speed [S400] - Max payload [0x09/2048]
scsi1 : IEEE-1394 SBP-2 protocol driver
Vendor: Model: Rev:
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 9780750 512-byte hdwr sectors (5008 MB)
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0: [mac] p1 p2 p3

So other than four songs I put on from a friend's Mac, I'm stuck with a $400 doorstop until I get it working with Linux.

I've been keeping a journal-ish website to track my progress, and to encourage support from other would-be Linux iPod users:

http://neuron.com/~jason/ipod.html

The short story: no success yet, but we're close.

Details at: http://neuron.com/~jason/ipod.html.

I've looked hard at porting applications to Linux from Microsoft platforms, mostly VB apps. It's a bitch. There's no VB equivalent for Linux (I know there's some activity on this front), and I'm not aware of an easy porting path (if anyone knows one, comment, please).

That is the price you pay for developing with a platform specific tool like VB. Unfortunately, no good cross-platform VB-like RAD tool has acheived wide use. Delphi has potential if Borland/Inprise ports it. I'd also recommend looking at Visual TCL.

Why not try visual tcl? There are plenty of good books on it and it can make tclets which will run in Netscape or MSIE with a plugin. http://www.neuron.com/stewart/vtcl/ should get you started nicely.