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iPod Dissection and Review
Mister Man writes "I saw over at AnandTech that there is finally
a decent iPod review out there. Not only does the review include screen shots
galore, they also have some pretty cool pictures of what is inside that pretty
little box. Also discussed is information on how to connect an iPod to a Windows
based PC. Check out the
article for the real deal. Sadly, it doesn't seem like there is Linux based
software yet."
If I understand it correctly, what is holding iPod on Linux back is the lack of HFS+ support.
While HFS+ read support seems to be up and working (more or less), HFS+ write support is just not there. It's been on wishlists for years, but so far no luck.
Can anyone say what the stumbling block is? Is it lack of or misleading documentation? Is it a patent issue?
Is there code in Darwin that could be legally borrowed and turned into an HFS+ module?
Just dropping the mp3s onto the iPod hard disk doesn't allow you to play them.
The iPod keeps track of everything in a song database; you need to figure out how to create and modify this database in order for the iPod to recognize and play songs.
My current favorite is ID3-TagIT. It lets you go back and forth from filenames to tags in both directions, supports batch tagging and batch renaming, upper/lower case correction, id3v1<->id3v2, automatic sorting into folders, etc. It's very comprehensive and easy to use.
http://giantlaser.com/~jason/ipod.html
...
interesting link
You need MacDrive or MacOpener to be installed too but if it allows me to copy MP3's from an iPod to the PC (which neither XPlay or iTunes allow you to do) then its going to be a winner.
ps. Yes I know why they've done it but its something I (and probably others) would find useful whatever your moral standing.
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Apple's making alot of money from the iPod, and not just from the device's sales. The iPod is bringing in people to the Apple Store, where many of them end up buying Macs. 40% of the Apple Store's computer buyers don't already own macs.
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That font is actually an old typeface called Chicago, and looks nothing like Apple Garamond. It does make the iPod look more Mac-like, though in a retro sort of way (Apple hasn't used that font in years). I imagine the reason it was selected for the iPod is the same reason the old Mac OSs used it. Their UI research determined that Chicago was superior as a screen font in terms of readability and the thicker appearance also made it easier on the eyes; remember this is long before GUI-level antialiasing was available.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
I've wanted an iPod since they came out. They are small, work extremely well, and produce good sound. Even with the high price, they are worth while. Of course, the problem is you really need a Mac to make all the bells and whistles work. This isn't a problem for apple though.
Between the iPod, the ease of creating a home DVD (iMovie, iDVD, + third party high end stuff, if you need it), manipulating pictures (iPhoto) and organizing your music (iTunes) Apple has got it right. I used to be a Mac lover, and now I'm ready to become one all over again. After seeing the new iMac in the store (which will fit on the kitchen desk, something my PC never has done) I'm going in whole hog.
What does that mean for apple? Well, they will get me for an iMac plus an iPod. Additionally someone (cannon, likely) will get a MinDV and a new still digial camera out of it. The digital hub is here, and is only going to get better.
The hold up for the Mac has always been other software. For my needs that's all there as well now. There are good ssh clients and terminal emulators. Office works, better than windows in fact. IE is available (yes, for web work you have to have it). Heck, there are even respectable games these days.
I think Apple is on the comeback, and I think their digital hub is a smash hit idea, both for the home user who "just wants it to work", as well as for the geek who "just wants the mundane to work" so he can get on with the cool stuff.
Here are four of the reasons:
1) Archos is somewhat bigger (in each of H, W and D)
2) Archos has slower transfer rates (USB 2 vs Firewire)
3) Archos is a lot lot uglier.
4) Archos weighs a lot lot more (350g vs 185g)
There are many more, but that's enough to be going on with.
i'm an impulse buyer. i have a win2k box but my dad has a cube, so i figured i wouldn't be totaly dead in the water. here are my observations:
i never cared about id3 tags because i centralize my meta info in a database. after my first import, i had 3 differient spellings and therefore 3 differient artists for the dave matthews band. no delete capability in Xplay. FRICK! nothing a perl script (and my dad's mac) can't fix though.
other than that, Xplay rocks. i had 1 or 2 stability problems, but it gets the job done. on the face of it, it seems more than just a read / write HFS+ filesystem going on in here. there is a database that gets populated with id3 info. not sure if that's some sort of layer over the filesystem, or if the db just gets populated seperatly.
i would have liked a more standard filesystem so i could use this thing as a general firewire drive. (as it stands, i can move big files from mac to mac. pointless for me.)
audio quality rocks. i a/b tested this with winamp (whose quality sucks) and splay (still my favorite). it's up there.
the earbuds aren't the most comfortable, but it's saveing grace is the volume level. this thing can get LOUD! the other mp3 players never really could cut it for me.
gets scratched easily, but it smells realy nice. big thing with me. smells like a new hard drive you just opened. and it keeps smelling new car'ish.
literature says it holds 20 minutes in ram. (anti skip) you pick a set of tunes to play and press play. there is a pause as it spins up it's disk and then play begins. i guess it preloads the files then and spins the drive down. if you skip 4 or 5 songs (20 minutes worth) you have to wait for the drive to spin up again. takes a second or 2. no big deal, i'm just impatient.
hopefully it's best feature will be that it forces us to get read/write HFS+ going. if so, i'd look into trying to repartition the drive so i could have a 5 meg FAT partition that could hold the windows / linux HFS+ drivers and use this thing as a portable hard drive as well.
The audio quality on the iPod is ok. My biggest gripe is the headphone jack appears underpowered and there appears to be some noise introduced in the signal. Granted, it's nowhere near the noise levels of a laptop, but it's there.
Now I do have some problems with the quality of iTunes; the peice of software you use to manage the iPod (yes, you can do it directly, but come on, insert cd, hit import, plug in iPod; it can't get any easier.)
A friend of mine noted that iTunes's MP3 encoder has some problems with introducing artifacts into the audio. I honestly didn't believe him until he took an MP3 he encoded with LAME and directly compared it to one encoded with iTunes and sure enough, at the beginning of the song where there should have been silence was a warping of audio which I now notice during playback.
iTunes also has the interesting problem (though it's probably more of a CDDB fault) of not supporting UTF-8 in ID3 tags, so foreign CDs are either romanized or are in a character set not understood correctly.
In my opinion, the iPod is the best portable MP3 player out there for it's size. It doesn't make a good companion while exercising, but for long train rides, it can't be beat.
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There is a good collection of information here on efforts to get the iPod working with Linux. It's not just a matter of HFS+ support, but also reverse-engineering the iTunes database format.