quick question for ipod users.

[maskedman72]

i have an ipod with itunes and i am wondering how i go about manually entering my own information in the songs/artists/album/genre fields?

right now the only way i have found to do this is to click on each field for 10 seconds and let go. than it will allow me to type my own info in only that one field. there must be a faster way.
thanks -jay


ps-i couldnt find this info in the manual.

[subframe]

In iTunes, select the song(s) you want to modify, and press Command-I (same as 'get info' in OSX), or click on File->Get Info

[mersisblue]

heres a tip for you

Select all (command a) and then info (command I)

and delete all album names I find this helps find songs faster in the ipod

[mersisblue]

oh also selecting all 50 cent song by shift clicking

or by selecting them one by one (by command clicking) and then editing info (command I) is also helpful

[maskedman72]

thanks!!!!!!!!!

[maskedman72]

now...should i be importing my cd collection at 128 or 320 kbps?

[inaudio]

Try AAC - sounds much better to me.

<L>

[pounce]

Originally posted by mersisblue
oh also selecting all 50 cent song by shift clicking

or by selecting them one by one (by command clicking) and then editing info (command I) is also helpful

fortunately, there are no 50 cent tracks in my ipod. solves that problem right away.

just got an ipod photo for xmas and am still loading cd's into it. 2300 songs in so far with stacks of cd's to go.

ps: what i wish for is a reliable way for itunes to get album art for the cds without me doing it manually for each one. it's cool when the ipod photo shows you the album art for the track you are playing.

[Geert van den Berg]

I see no reason to delete album names. I find it handy to select on albums sometimes too. The increase in speed can't be so dramatic, is it?

[mersisblue]

Originally posted by GvdB
I see no reason to delete album names. I find it handy to select on albums sometimes too. The increase in speed can't be so dramatic, is it?

well I guess its personal preference

yeah I guess it onl;y saves one click but ...

also I havent put a whole album one mine so that might be a reason why I havent kept this

[GilWave]

Originally posted by inaudio
Try AAC - sounds much better to me.

<L>

Sounds better, yes - but at the expense of portability.

[DrDeltaM]

Originally posted by GilWave
but at the expense of portability.

How you mean?

[fross]

Tell me more about AAC files. How do they compare to the other file formats?

I was told on the IPOD forum that wave files sounded the best. They take up about 10x the space, but they do sound better. I have both mp3 and wav. files on my IPOD and to my ears, the wav. files sound smoother, less harsh or brittle.

[DrDeltaM]

Originally posted by fross
Tell me more about AAC files. How do they compare to the other file formats?

Why don't you try yourself? You can encode to AAC with iTunes. AAC is the iTunes, iTunes Music Store adn iPod standard format.

[StoneinaPond]

Originally posted by fross
... I have both mp3 and wav. files on my IPOD and to my ears, the wav. files sound smoother, less harsh or brittle.

If you heard otherwise, I would have recommended you visit a hearing specialist.

I don't know whether Apple Lossless is an Apple thing only, but for about half the file size of a CD you get amazing quality. Very difficult to distinguish between the source and the lossless version.

[DrDeltaM]

Originally posted by StoneinaPond
Very difficult to distinguish between the source and the lossless version.

It should be indistinguishable. Otherwise it wouldn't be lossless, would it?

[StoneinaPond]

Originally posted by DrDeltaM
It should be indistinguishable. Otherwise it wouldn't be lossless, would it?

Call it what you will, but you are removing half the data.

Besides, I'm not a man of absolutes.

Funnily enough, at times the lossless version is actually an improvement, as if someone wiped some dust off of a window.

Perhaps they should market a Mastering Version.

[DrDeltaM]

Originally posted by StoneinaPond
Call it what you will, but you are removing half the data.

Write a book. Look at it's filesize. Zip it. Look Again. Unzip it. Try reading your book.



Of course you can compress without dataloss. There's just a limit on how much you can compress, and that can be (depending on the algorithm) very data-type specific. For Apple Lossless, that limit seems to be compressing to 50%

[inaudio]

NOT the same.

"Write a book. Look at it's filesize. Zip it. Look Again. Unzip it. Try reading your book."

Buy a cello. Play it, weigh it. Crunch it up into a shoebox, and try to play it. Weighs the same! Glue it all together again and then try to play it.

Silly analogy, but the words - or notes - on paper are nothing like the music in the air, or on a CD.

You can wad up a score and still play it, but you can't compress a cello (or Piano, or whatever). You can compress the text but music suffers.

<L>

[js1]

Lossless is truly lossless. It will provide a byte by byte identical file to the original when uncompressed.

I'm sure that you won't disagree that zip compression is lossless for data files. But the techniques that zip uses for compressing data files don't really do much for audio files. For example, one of the most basic data compressons is to look for repeating bytes and replace it with the bytes and the number of times that it repeats. You don't get repeated bytes in audio files very often.

There's been significant research into algorithms that can compress audio files without loss. And lossless compression works.

BUT...

By doing some preconditioning of the audio before doing the conversion (primarily low pass filtering), you can get better compression ratios.

For a tech overview of one lossless encoder (Meridian Lossless Packing) see http://www.meridian-audio.com/w_paper/2_1.PDF

js

[DrDeltaM]

Originally posted by inaudio
NOT the same.

"Write a book. Look at it's filesize. Zip it. Look Again. Unzip it. Try reading your book."

Buy a cello. Play it, weigh it. Crunch it up into a shoebox, and try to play it. Weighs the same! Glue it all together again and then try to play it.

Silly analogy, but the words - or notes - on paper are nothing like the music in the air, or on a CD.

You can wad up a score and still play it, but you can't compress a cello (or Piano, or whatever). You can compress the text but music suffers.

<L>

Digital audio is just a bunch of data: 0's and 1's, just like a text on a computer is digital data: 0's and 1's. I never said you're compressing a real instrument or some waves in the air or whatever (dunno where you got that?).

Both are just a string of 0's and 1's. There's no difference for a normal zip algorithm actually, it doesn't know if it's text or a picture or music or whatever.

As said in the previous post, you can of course optimise a certain algorithms for a certain specific goal.

[StoneinaPond]

Originally posted by DrDeltaM
Write a book. Look at it's filesize. Zip it. Look Again. Unzip it. Try reading your book.



Of course you can compress without dataloss. There's just a limit on how much you can compress, and that can be (depending on the algorithm) very data-type specific. For Apple Lossless, that limit seems to be compressing to 50%

Wait a minute here.

Are you saying that the iPod has a decoder inside it to uncompress the data on playback?

[DrDeltaM]

Originally posted by StoneinaPond
Wait a minute here.

Are you saying that the iPod has a decoder inside it to uncompress the data on playback?

That's the whole idea of any compressed file, it's smaller when it's compressed, but it's 'useless' at that moment. You need to decompress to use it again.
Some compressionalgorithms are non realtime (like the 'file' can only be used after the decompression has completed), some are realtime, like those for audio ( mp3, AAC, wmv, ogg vorbis, Apple Lossless, ...)

[Geert van den Berg]

I think the comparsion Mathijs made is fair. We're talking digital data here.

If you would zip or sit a program file or an installer file for a computer it gets smaller, right?

If the content would be changed it wouldn't properly install anymore, or to speak in Mathijs book analogy, it would be unreadable.

Offcourse the Ipod has a decoder inside, it also had to decode MP3 or AAC to make it listenable.

The word is that Apple lossless is the same thing as Emagic Zap, which was Emagic's audio answer to zip. And as the name implies it is lossless.

And it's great but the drawback with the Ipod is that the playback buffer has to be filled more and the disk has to spin up more and thus the playback time of your Ipod is limited compared to playing back AAC files.

[dnaflr2]

Keep in mind that by editing your files within I-Tunes you are not actually changing thhe ID/TAgs of the file. To do this you can download a free version of MP3 RAGE from versiontracker.com.

This application is great for batching out large amounts of files.